t Jehovah
would vindicate His rights. He had proved himself very real in Egypt.
Other gods would not displace Him: He would observe them: they would be
"before Me."[36] God does not quit the scene when man forgets Him.

Now, it is hard for us to realise the charm which the worship of false
gods possessed for ancient Israel. To comprehend it we must reflect upon
the universal ignorance which made every phenomenon of nature a
portentous manifestation of mysterious and varied power, which they
could by no means trace back to a common origin, while the crash and
discord of the results appeared to indicate opposing wills behind. We
must reflect how closely akin is awe to worship, and how blind and
unintelligent was the awe which storm and earthquake and pestilence then
excited. We must remember the pressure upon them of surrounding
superstitions armed with all the civilisation and art of their world.
Above all, we must consider that the gods which seduced them were not of
necessity supreme: homage to them was very fairly consistent with a
reservation of the highest place for another; so that false worship in
its early stages need not have been much more startling than belief in
witchcraft, or in the paltry and unimaginative "spirits" which, in our
own day, are reputed to play the banjo in a dark room, and to untie
knots in a cabinet. Is it for us to deride them?

To oppose all such tendencies, the Lord appealed not to philosophy and
sound reason. These are not the parents of monotheism: they are the
fruit of it. And so is our modern science. Its fundamental principle is
faith in the unity of nature, and in the extent to which the same laws
which govern our little world reach through the vast universe. And that
faith is directly traceable to the conviction that all the universe is
the work of the same Hand.

"One God, one law, one element;"--the preaching of the first was sure to
suggest the other two. Nor could any race which believed in a multitude
of gods labour earnestly to reduce various phenomena to one cause.
Monotheism is therefore the parent of correct thinking, and could not
draw its sanctions thence. No: the law appeals to the historical
experience of Israel; it is content to stand and fall by that; if they
acknowledged the claim of God upon their loyalty, all the rest followed.
Their own story made good this claim. And so does the whole story of the
Church, and the whole inner life of every man who knows anythin