Watch him at work: in the hands of the Jewish priesthood the Augustan Age in the history of Israel became an age of decline; the exile, the protracted misfortune transformed itself into eternal punishment for the Augustan Age that age in which the priest did not yet exist Out of the mighty and thoroughly free born figures of the history of Israel, they made, according to their requirements, either wretched bigots and hypocrites, or godless ones they simplified the psychology of every great event to the idiotic formula obedient or disobedient to God.