Through the idea of sanction grafted thus upon that of providence, religion assumes a really systematic character, and becomes attached to the very fibres of the human heart. As instruments of goodness in the universe, the gods, or at least the sovereign gods, serve to confirm human morality; they become in some sort the life of morality. Their existence is no longer simply a physical fact; it is a physical fact, morally justified by a social instinct which relies upon it as its main safeguard. Henceforth the power of the gods is legitimate. A divine king, like a human king, requires a certain mystic consecration; it is religion which consecrates human kings, it is morality which consecrates the king of the gods. [Sidenote: Importance of conception of immortality in the moral evolution of religion.] The notion of a divine intervention to trim the balance of the social order, to punish and to recompense, was at first altogether foreign to the belief in a continuation of life after death; it became allied to this belief much later. Even among a people so advanced as the Hebrews in matters of religious evolution, reward and punishment beyond this life played no rôle, and yet there has scarcely ever been a people who believed more heartily in the will of God as directing the life of mankind; but in their eyes God achieved his victory in this life; they possessed no need for an immortality as a means of redressing the moral balance of the world.[45] It was only later, when the critical sense had attained a higher development, that it was recognized that the sanction did not always come in this life; the chastisement of the culpable, the hoped-for recompense of the virtuous, gradually retreated from the present world into a distant future. Hell and heaven were thrown open to correct the manifest imperfections of this life. The notion of immortality thus assumed an extraordinary importance, insomuch that it seemed as if modern life would be destroyed if it were deprived of this belief, which former times had, however, succeeded in doing without. At bottom a clear and reflective conception of a life after death, in which one is rewarded or punished for one’s life here, is a very complex and remote deduction from the notion of sanction.