MSS. of Sophocles and Lucretius. "The higher criticism" has not always enjoyed a very good reputation in England, and we must certainly take our authorities for what they may be worth. The work of Dr. Cheyne, for instance, is much more daring and perhaps less acceptable than that of Dr. Driver, and there are immense differences between German critics of the advanced type and their more cautious brethren. Still, textual criticism has advanced by leaps and bounds, and certain conclusions are now accepted by all thinkers except those who, through diffidence or obstinacy, are still shut up in the narrow ecclesiastical prison.

Roughly speaking, the Hebrew documents in our Bible went through three or four revisions and redactions among the Jews themselves. Taken as a whole the Bible, as we have it, is largely the manufacture of priestly writers during and after the Babylonian exile. But of course there are earlier elements, some of a high antiquity. The elements are generally discriminated in the following fashion. We have Jahvist writings; and the work of the Jahvist (so called because of the use of the word Jahveh, the Israelitish God) is usually designated as J. Then there are Elohistic elements, so called from the use of the word El and Elohim, to represent the God of Israel, and it seems that the Elohistic elements came from the Northern kingdom, while the Jahvistic emanated from Judah. J. and E. were united by another hand. Next comes the work of the Deuteronomist (D.), which we may date with accuracy in the time of Josiah, about the time when the Book of the Law was discovered by Hilkiah. Last came the priestly revision known as P., which may have begun with the return of Ezra and Nehemiah during the Persian period, when the Hebrews were released by Cyrus. The great characteristic of the priestly revision was the inculcation throughout of ceremonial and liturgical elements and the sacred authority of the Torah.

The whole meaning of this priestly revision cannot be understood until we recognize its marvellous permanence. For by it the Hebraic spirit was shut up in a prison house 1 See also next section (p. 10, et foll.)

from which it has never emerged. Not only is this the case, but the religious spirit of Christianity has itself, so far as it is dependent on the organization of the Jewish cultus, been bound in fetters which the most original and most aspiring spirits, such as Paul in earlier times and Luther in modern, have found it extremely difficult to endure. To understand this, however, we must first apprehend the historic fact that the Hebrews in the course of their career had four different phases of religion, or perhaps we should say four different religions. The origin of the race is to be found in Northern Arabia, whence there issued a series of movements mainly in the northward direction. It is not quite certain that the Jews were ever in Egypt at all, but it is certain that the Egyptian religion had exceedingly little influence upon them as compared with the Babylonian. But if the cradle of the Jewish race is to be found in Arabia, the earliest faith was clearly a nomad faith1-a nomad religion peculiar in this respect, that it believed in its God as not only a necessary part of faith but as a disposer and regulator of its social life. Jahveh was the tribal God, but it was a characteristic of Jahveh that he ordained social demeanour. Here we touch upon an essential characteristic of the Jew from the very outset, the intimate connection between ethics and religion. The nomad faith was simple enough. It did not attach value to sacrifices: it did not lay stress upon worship: it had nothing to do with altars made by hands, and it believed with profound conviction that its God ordained the relations between the members of the tribe. These nomads starting from Arabia, and having connections in Mesopotamia and possibly Egypt, enter the Land of Canaan. And now, instead of the nomad faith, we have a peasant religion by no means so pure as that with which the race was originally endowed. For the children of Jahveh come into contact with the Canaanite peoples and borrow alien elements from their surroundings. Jahveh is still their tribal God, but there are a number of rival deities-Chemosh and Milcom, Baal,

1 The fierce little song of Lamech (Gen. iv. 23, 24) probably comes to us from this early period.

Melkarth and Ishtar (Astarte). The children of Israel begin to pay attention to local deities. They worship pillars and piles of stones. They abandon their simple faith for the beginnings of a definite cultus. They accept altars, sacrifices, even human sacrifices. Blood is a sort of propitiatory medium between the worshipper and his God. The ministrations of a priestly class become important. And now comes the third and most brilliant stage of the Hebrew religion, the religion of the Prophets. What was the message of Amos, of Hosea, of Isaiah? It was in one sense a return to the old nomad faith. In another sense it was the most idealistic religion that had hitherto been conceived. Observe that the Prophets will have nothing to do with the cultus. "I am weary of your sacrifices: bring me no more vain oblations. Your solemn festivals and your high days I cannot away with. Wash you. Make you clean. Learn to do good. Cease to do evil." Throughout stress is laid on the personal relation of the worshipper and his God, uninfluenced by the ceremonial observances of the priest. Jeremiah, in some ways, though not in all, the deepest of the Prophets, strikes with no uncertain hand the note of personal religion, anticipating some of the most beautiful and most pathetic of the Psalms.

Moreover, the notion of God is vastly enlarged. Jahveh is no longer the tribal God: he is the God of the whole earth, and all his supposed rivals are either devils or non-existent. Jahveh uses other nations to punish the Israelites for their lack of faith. One step more, and we get wholly out of the region of Jewish particularism into the free atmosphere of a world-wide faith. Is God only the God of the Jews? No, he is the God of the whole earth. The persistent and enfeebling notion that Israel was the Chosen People, that Israel not only belonged to Jahveh, but that Jahveh belonged to Israel, evaporates in the clear mind of the Prophets like a mist before the sunrise. And so we have here and there in the Bible some welcome indications of this exalted standpoint-in the Book of Ruth, where a Moabitess figures as the ancestress of the Royal Line

of David, and in the Book of Jonah, in which a narrow-minded and intolerant Jewish prophet discovers that God sends him to preach to the Ninevites. But it is rarely that a race can live at the height of its best thoughts. The air is too rarefied for the ordinary man to breathe. So the next stage in this eventful history is a priestly religion, engineered by men like Ezra, who believed that the Sabbath was a prime article of their faith, and that circumcision was the test of the genuine Hebrew. The Sabbath was either originally a new moon festival or borrowed from Babylon, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the so-called Day of Rest, written into the earliest chapters of Genesis by the priestly revisers. Circumcision was nothing remarkable, for very likely it was the practice of the Arab tribes, and became important only when the Jews found themselves among uncircumcised nations. Jeremiah thought nothing of circumcision, just as Paul found himself obliged to minimize its value when the Gospel was preached to the Gentiles. But after the Babylonian exile men like Ezekiel and Ezra reintroduced the sacrificial cultus with all the appalling list of ceremonial observances which made the life of a pious Hebrew so distressingly onerous. Jerusalem became the only place in which men could worship, and a pious and also a ridiculous picture was drawn of God Himself studying, for his own edification, the Torah. Here was the opportunity for the ecclesiastical intelligence, which made masterly use of its opportunities. The worshipper found a series of obstacles between himself and his God-priests to expound the Law, priests to conduct his sacrifices, priests to ban and to bless, while into the Holy of Holies only the High Priest himself could enter. The message of the Prophets was forgotten: the Scribes and Pharisees held the people in fetters until Jesus of Nazareth, reviving in his own person the Prophets of his race, broke the yoke of Pharisaism and taught a better way.

"All these things are written for our instruction upon whom the ends of the world are come." It is no business of mine to enter upon any dogmatic conclusion. Yet one

dogma, if it be a dogma, is the clear and decisive result of the brief narrative which I have tried to sketch. I said just now that if we were patient with scholarly exegesis and textual criticism we should get back something to make us love and venerate the Scriptures with a more reasonable love and veneration than was possible to us before. It looks as if, in the divine economy of things, the Jews existed to teach us by one sovereign example the real meaning of religion. The two extraordinary features about the Jewish creed from beginning to end are, first its monotheism, and second its faith in the indissolubility of religion and conduct. The second point is vastly more important than the first. It might be maintained-it has been maintainedthat the Jews derived their monotheism from others, but this intimate connection between what a man believes and what he does, this sacred alliance between religion and ethics, seems to have belonged to Israel from the earliest times. It existed in the nomad faith, it was illustrated with magnificent imagery and flashing eloquence by the Prophets. The Israelites forgot it in Canaan, until men like Hosea, Amos, Micah and Isaiah taught it to them again. They forgot it when the priests began their unfortunate supremacy. And they have to a large extent forgotten it ever since. Jesus tried to teach them, and they rejected him. Nevertheless, the precious truth remained enshrined in their old Scriptures, so that he who runs might read. The prophets began, and many pious and reverent minds continued, to instil the true and lasting elements of all real religion. What doth the Lord require of thee? To do justice and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. The essence of religion is the intimate personal relation between the individual and the God whom he recognizes-a bond so close and vital that sin becomes apostasy, an act of infidelity towards the author of his life and the inspirer of his thoughts.