The authors of the Jewish laws could at most only answer: "We confess that we are excessively ignorant; that we did not learn the art of writing until a late period; that our people were a wild and barbarous horde, that wandered, as our own records admit, for nearly half a century in impracticable deserts, and at length obtained possession of a petty territory by the most odious rapine and detestable cruelty ever mentioned in the records of history. We had no commerce with civilized nations, and how could you suppose that, so grossly mean and grovelling as we are in all our ideas and usages, we should have invented a system so refined and spiritual as that in question?" We employed the word which most nearly corresponds with soul, merely to signify life; we know our God and His ministers, His angels, only as corporeal beings; the distinction of soul and body, the idea of a life beyond death, can be the fruit only of long meditation and refined philosophy. Ask the Hottentots and negroes, who inhabit a country a hundred times larger than ours, whether they know anything of a life to come? We thought we had done enough in persuading the people under our influence that God punished offenders to the fourth generation, either by leprosy, by sudden death, or by the loss of the little property of which the criminal might be possessed. To this apology it might be replied: "You have invented a system, the ridicule and absurdity of which are as clear as the sun at noon-day; for the offender who enjoyed good health, and whose family were in prosperous circumstances, must absolutely have laughed you to scorn." The apologist for the Jewish law would here rejoin: "You are much mistaken; since for one criminal who reasoned correctly, there were a hundred who never reasoned at all. The man who, after he had committed a crime, found no punishment of it attached to himself or his son, would yet tremble for his grandson. Besides, if after the time of committing his offence he was not speedily seized with some festering sore, such as our nation was extremely subject to, he would experience it in the course of years. Calamities are always occurring in a family, and we, without difficulty, instilled the belief that these calamities were inflicted by the hand of God taking vengeance for secret offences." It would be easy to reply to this answer by saying: "Your apology is worth nothing; for it happens every day that very worthy and excellent persons lose their health and their property; and, if there were no family that did not experience calamity, and that calamity at the same time was a chastisement from God, all the families of your community must have been made up of scoundrels."