In this connection his theory of penance and punishment for crime is of peculiar interest. He makes considerable use of Biblical narratives to illustrate his teachings and refers at length to some of the less worthy characters of Holy Writ, including certain men who suffered death for criminal offenses. Almost invariably he justifies the punishment by arguing that it was better for the criminal to suffer a swift punishment in death than to suffer eternally in hell. Apparently his theory is that a criminal can cleanse himself in his own blood, that a temporal death can save him from eternal punishment. The idolaters who were slain by Moses and the Levites[114] “were cleansed in their penance and in the pangs which they suffered when they died; and it was much better for them to suffer a brief pain in death than a long torture in hell.” The sacramental efficiency of the death penalty seems also to extend to the one who executes punishment: for those who assisted Moses in the slaughter sanctified their hands in the blood of those who were slain. In the same way “a king cleanses himself in the blood of the unjust, if he slays them as a rightful punishment to fulfil the sacred laws.”[115] Footnote 114: Exodus, xxxii. Footnote 115: C. lxi. There can be little doubt that this doctrine of the death penalty also shows the influence of the great civil conflict which ended with the death of Duke Skule in 1240. During a century of factional warfare there had been much violence, much slaughter, much “swift punishment.” Applied to Norwegian history the author’s argument amounts to a justification of the slaughter at Elgesæter; for Skule and his partisans had rebelled against the Lord’s anointed. The hands of the Birchshanks were cleansed and sanctified in the blood of the rebels; but the author also has this comforting assurance for the kinsmen of the fallen, that their souls were not lost: Skule and his companions were cleansed from their sins in the last great penance of death. It may also be that this same long record of violence, treason, and rebellion was responsible for the prominence that the _King’s Mirror_ gives to the duty of obedience. In the political ethics of the work obedience is the chief virtue and the central principle. Conversely disobedience is the greatest of all sins. When Saul spared the Amalekites, whom the Lord had ordered him to destroy, he sinned far more grievously than did David when he dishonored Uriah’s wife and afterward brought about Uriah’s death; for Saul neglected to carry out the commands of God, and “no offense is graver than to be disobedient toward one’s superiors.”[116] Footnote 116: C. lxiii.