In place of inclusive, reasoned, ethical principles, the Protestant set up fragmentary taboos. On account of his rejection of Christian tradition, he was driven to build upon the Scriptures alone. In none of the canonical books could he find the ethical principles of the New Testament, with their implications, built up into a coordinated manual of ethics. Moreover, the early, formative Protestants vastly preferred the Old Testament which showed the ancient Jews in the taboo stage of morals, to the specifically Christian traditions of the historic Church. Taboo is the stage in which morals are not a matter of reasoned general principles of conduct, but consist merely of disconnected prohibitions of specific acts. Of course, Catholicism has its taboos, such as abstinence from meat on Fridays, but these are marks of distinctive religious observance rather than general rules of conduct. In his Bible, which he had stripped naked of tradition, the Protestant found the ancient Jewish taboos impressively codified, by contrast with the Christian principles scattered through the New Testament. With his profession of Christianity, his rejection of Christian tradition, and his intimate admiration for the ancient Jews, his ethical course was clear. That part of Catholic morals which was not capable of expression in hard and fast taboos he would not actually disown but would gradually allow to be forgotten. So it has been with reference to avarice and envy, for example. Accordingly we see the great prizes of power and social distinction awarded as the result of successful avarice in the pursuit of wealth; envy rampant, and sloth unashamed both in the “ca-canny” labourer who restricts his output, and in the rich who are no longer held by custom to perform any service or duty in return for the economic power lodged in them. On the other hand Protestantism concentrates its moral fervour upon the element in traditional Christian morals which can be even approximated through taboos. Hence illicit sexual intercourse and excess in eating and drinking are particularly condemned. As time went on, since the ill effects of over-eating were less immediately obvious than those of drunkenness, this last has come to stand alone with adultery and fornication as the targets for Protestant moral attack. To-day educated Protestants will sometimes tell you that a Christian life consists chiefly in refraining from women other than one’s wife and from drink! Of course this attitude is a reversal of the sound European tradition which thought of the sins springing from an excess of natural sensual desire as far less repellent than the mean and despicable sins, culminating in treachery, which derive from a perversion of man’s spiritual nature.