14 THE APOSTLE PAUL recognises. Here as elsewhere there betrays itself the predominantly juristic spirit of this theology, which externalised religion into a legal relation between God and man. It is, moreover, to be remarked that in this doctrine of vicarious expiation, as well as in the previously-mentioned doctrine of intermediate beings and demons, the Judaism of that period was in the closest touch with those conceptions of the contemporary paganism which underlay, especially, the expiatory ritual of the mystery-cults. The conception took, no doubt, a somewhat different form in the one and the other; in the one it was a juridical act, the payment of a ransom on behalf of another ; in the other it was a magic act, the removal of a corrupting infection through the sacred blood of a sacrifice, whether of animals (Taurobolium), or, in some cases, of men (self-mutilation of the priests of Cybele): but ultimately both come to the same thing —that the guilt of sin can be removed by outward, ethically indifferent means. But the fact that this unethical conception, which is as contrary to the spirit of the Hebrew prophets as it is to that of Greek philosophy, had then an equal vogue among both Jews and pagans, points, without doubt, to a soul-sickness of mankind at that time, to a morbidly intense consciousness of sin and feeling of apprehen- sion, such as is constantly met with in times of extreme distress and social disorder (as, for example, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages). But as this irrational conception of the necessity and value of these bloody sacrifices for sin did, as a matter of fact, rule the sick world, it was almost inevitable that the new religion which came to bring salvation