every man shall be put to death for his own sin (II Kings, xiv, 5-6). One of the reasons for this law was, in all probability, the abuse of the right of the Goel to slay the murderer of his kinsman. The Goel was lawfully entitled to take revenge on the murderer, and under the theory of the old law he could kill the members of the murderer's family also, slaying the father for the crime of the son, and the son for the crime of the father. Every such death led to further retaliation, and resulted in the estab lishment of a blood feud between entire families and tribes and even nations. In a nomadic life such a condition of affairs might be tolerated, but it was entirely in compatible with life in settled communities, and the law fixing the responsibility of the crime on the wrong-doer and punishing him only, was the result of the extension of the instinct of self-preservation from the indi vidual to the community, for the self-preser vation of the community required protection of the life and property of its members. Old ideas die hard; and even as late as the days of Jeremiah it was necessary for the prophet to emphasize the individual responsibility of every man for his own acts, in the face of the old popular conception that the children must suffer for the father's wrong. " In those days," says Jeremiah, "they shall say no more the fathers have eaten the sour grape and the children's teeth are set on edge, but every one shall die for his own wickedness. Every man that eateth the sour grape his teeth shall be set on edge." It is here seen how the old concep tion of the family responsibility had fixed itself in popular speech as a proverb, which, with the well-known pertinacity of proverbs, was still current among the people long after all reason had departed from it. Many years afterwards the prophet Ezekiel had to preach a sermon to the people on the
same text. In the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Ezekiel this doctrine of individual responsibility is set forth with burning elo quence. Psychologically it is interesting as showing how persistent old ideas are, and how extraordinary are the forces that must be brought to bear upon them to effectuate any change. A proposition that seems quite obvious to us required a tremendous outburst of oratory and prophetic zeal to impress it on the minds of the people of those days, and even then it found acceptance only among the few. Although the Deuteronomic law put an end to the old family responsibility for crime committed by one of its members, neverthe less in some other respects the family re sponsibility continued for a long time, and that was probably the reason why the people in the clays of Jeremiah and Ezekiel were still dominated by this idea. Children were assets for the payment of debts, and they could be called upon by the creditor of the father to satisfy his debt or be seized and sold for its satisfaction (II Kings, iv, 1; Mat thew, xviii, 25). The fact that after the establishment of the legal proposition of individual responsibility for crime, family responsibility still continued to exist in some other cases gave rise to some confusion of ideas. It is often supposed that the Deu teronomic law which put an end to family responsibility for crime is contradicted by that portion of the Third Commandment which reads, " I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children even to the third and fourth generations of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments;" but this passage in the Decalogue is not a law. It is simply a poetic way of conveying a certain moral truth. If this passage be taken literally, as all laws should, it will
