of Israel had sometimes thrown off the judicial dignity to act with all the animus of a party to the cause. This was natural perhaps where the subject-matter of the inquiry was the worship and honor to be paid to himself. It was natural that he should take a strong personal interest in such cases; but as all opposition (among the Jews at least) had passed away, and he remained in exclusive possession of the throne, he could afford to treat the charges with which he had now to deal—mere infractions of morality, for example—in a much more impartial spirit.
In addition to this cause of transformation, the natural growth of religious feeling had tended to replace the older deity by a modified conception, and Jesus, falling in in this respect with the course of thought already in progress, contributed to effect a still further modification in the same direction. Hence, although there is nowhere an absolute break between the old and the new conceptions, the God of the New Testament is practically a very different person from the God of the Old. We cannot conceive him doing the same things. The worst action, in the way of interference in mundane matters, of which the God of the New Testament is guilty, is, perhaps, the sudden slaughter of Ananias and Sapphira. But what is this to such enormities as the deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the commission of bears to devour little children who had ridiculed the baldness of a prophet? Horrors like these, so consistent with the general mode of proceedure of the ancient Jehovah, are wholly incompatible with the characteristics so often ascribed to the more recent God. According to the theories of the New Testament, the crime committed by the Jews in executing Jesus was at least as great as the crimes for which the antediluvians and the Sodomites had been so ruthlessly exterminated. Yet we cannot imagine Jesus as even wishing for the extermination of his contemporaries by water or by fire. The God whose love for mankind he had been teaching could not for a moment be thought of as consenting to such a course. While Elijah the Tishbite is represented as positively praying for the instant death of one hundred men who came to him with a message from his king, Jesus, on the contrary, is depicted as actually healing the only one of his enemies who had
