and present times. It is not my object to interfere, even in the
slightest degree, with beliefs which anybody holds sacred; or to alter
the conviction of any one who is of opinion that, in dealing with
theology, we ought to be guided by considerations different from those
which would be thought appropriate if the problem lay in the province
of chemistry or of mineralogy. And if people of these ways of thinking
choose to read beyond the present paragraph, the responsibility for
meeting with anything they may dislike rests with them and not with me.

We are all likely to be more familiar with the theological history of
the Israelites than with that of any other nation. We may therefore
fitly make it the first object of our studies; and it will be convenient
to commence with that period which lies between the invasion of Canaan
and the early days of the monarchy, and answers to the eleventh and
twelfth centuries B.C. or thereabouts. The evidence on which any
conclusion as to the nature of Israelitic theology in those days must be
based is wholly contained in the Hebrew Scriptures--an agglomeration
of documents which certainly belong to very different ages, but of the
exact dates and authorship of any one of which (except perhaps a few
of the prophetical writings) there is no evidence, either internal or
external, so far as I can discover, of such a nature as to justify more
than a confession of ignorance, or, at most, an approximate conclusion.
In this venerable record of ancient life, miscalled a book, when it
is really a library comparable to a selection of works from English
literature between the times of Beda and those of Milton, we have the
stratified deposits (often confused and even with their natural order
inverted) left by the stream of the intellectual and moral life of
Israel during many centuries. And, embedded in these strata, there are
numerous remains of forms of thought which once lived, and which,
though often unfortunately mere fragments, are of priceless value to
the anthropologist. Our task is to rescue these from their relatively
unimportant surroundings, and by careful comparison with existing forms
of theology to make the dead world which they record live again. In
other words, our problem is palaeontological, and the method pursued
must be the same as that employed in dealing with other fossil remains.

Among the richest of the fossiliferous strata to which I have alluded
are the books of Judges an