Thus, then, under Moses, the Judges, and the Kings, we find numberless instances of toleration. Moreover, we are told by Moses, that “God will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation.” This threat was necessary to a people to whom God had not revealed the immortality of the soul, and the rewards and punishment of a future state. These truths are not to be found in any part of the decalogue, nor in the Levitic or Deuteronomic law. They were the tenets of the Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Cretans, but made no part of the Jewish religion. Moses does not say, “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thou mayest inherit _eternal_ life,” but “that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee”; that is, in this life; and the punishments with which he threatens them regard only the present mortal state; such as being smitten with the scab and with the itch, with blasting and with mildew; that they shall betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her; that they shall build houses, and others shall dwell therein; that they shall plant vineyards, and shall not gather the grapes thereof; that they shall eat the fruit of their own bodies, the flesh of their sons and of their daughters, and be obliged to bow down before the stranger that is within their gates;[56] but he never tells them that their souls are immortal, and shall taste of felicity or punishment after death. God, who conducted His people Himself, punished or rewarded them immediately according to their good or evil deeds. Everything relating to them was temporal, and this the learned Bishop Warburton brings as a proof of the divine origin of the Jewish law;[57] “inasmuch,” says he, “as God being their King, and exercising justice immediately upon them, according to their transgression or obedience, found it not necessary to reveal to them a doctrine which He reserved for after-times, when He should no longer so directly govern His people.” Those who through ignorance pretend that Moses taught the immortality of the soul, deprive the New Testament of one of its principal advantages over the Old. It is certain that the law of Moses taught only temporal punishments, extending to the fourth generation; and yet, notwithstanding the positive declaration of God delivered in this law, Ezekiel preached the very contrary to the Jews, telling them, “The son shall not bear the iniquities of the father;”[58][59] and in another place he goes so far as to make God say that “He had given them statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live.”[60]