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2. CROMWELL AND HIS ARMY ARE THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL: CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS An Idealised Cognitive model is a cognitive structure which is idealised for the purpose of understanding and reasoning, and whose function is to represent reality from a certain perspective 9 . Metaphoric models consist of a set of correspondences or mappings across conceptual domains. A source domain which has an experiential nature and a target domain with a more abstract nature. So the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing the target domain in terms of the source domain. Religion is one of those domains which needs to be understood in terms of a more concrete one. Jäkel maintains that «the domain of the religious should be largely if not completely dependent on metaphorical conceptualisation» 10 . George Lakoff explained «that if you’re doing to even think or talk about God, you’re going to have to use human experience as your basis and have an extensive collection of metaphors at your disposal» 11 . Now we will see how the relation among God, Cromwell, the Army and the Army’s enemies is conceptualised. This relation can only be understood in terms of the moral accounting metaphor 12 . These are the elements from the source domain we are interested in: — If you do something good for me, then I ‘owe’ you something, I am «in your debt». — Acting immorally gives one a moral debit. — Acting morally gives one moral credit. — Suffering (by moral arithmetic) gives one moral credit. 554 ARACELI BALLESTEROS GARCÍA 9 Cf. G. L AKOFF , Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago 1987). 10 O. J ÄKEL , «Hypotheses revisited: the cognitive theory of metaphor applied to religious texts», in Metaphorik 2 (2002) 23. 11 G. L AKOFF , Moral Politics. What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t (Chicago 1996) 244. 12 Cf. G. L AKOFF , «The metaphor system for Morality», in A. E. GOLDBERG (ed.), Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language (Stanford 1996) 249-266.