In practice certain crimes against the religious law were enforced by the state. Idolatry was a state offense, punishable as other state crimes. So of perjury and blasphemy. (Deut. 19: 16–19.)――――It was due to the common relations of church and state that to a great extent the religious orders were civil judges. In the absence of a king or other chief executive, the High Priest seems to have held that function. (See Deut. 17: 12 and 2 Chron. 19: 8–11). The subordinate judges were largely taken from the priests and Levites (Deut. 21: 5, and 33: 10). Since the system provided for an ultimate appeal to God, extreme cases were taken up for the sake of such appeal to the one place which was for the time the seat of God’s special manifestations to his people (Deut. 17: 8–13, and 19: 17). The wisdom of this joint action of the civil law with the religious admits in their case of no question. It may suffice to refer in proof to the omnipresent power of idolatry through all the ages from Moses to the captivity, to show the vital need of the civil arm to sustain the true worship of God and save the nation. On the other hand the state was the stronger for her religious institutions. The great religious festivals, bringing the masses of the male population from every tribe three times a year for a sacred week of communion must have been of priceless value in sustaining the national unity and a national patriotism. Jeroboam was sharp enough to see that the calves at Bethel and Dan must take the place of the festivals at Jerusalem, or his kingdom would melt away from under him, and his people give their civil fealty as well as their religious homage at the old center. Hezekiah would have brought the ten tribes back if he could have drawn their people in a body to the great Passover, as he sought to do.――――Hence it is quite safe to say that the state was the stronger for the national religion, and their religion the stronger for the aid of the state.――――Yet let none rush to the inference that such mutual relations of church and state are therefore wise and useful in the Christian age of the world. The providences of God shut off from the primitive church the possibility of such union and shut up Christianity to make her first great conquests under the sturdy opposition of the greatest civil power of the age. Experience has long since disproved the inference above referred to. The cases are too dissimilar to admit of any logical reasoning from that age to this.