religion. All local altars were swept away, all idolatries were
cleared from the Jerusalem temple, the priesthood was centred in the
capital and more thoroughly organized; in short, as our fathers read the
story, Mosaism was re-established, after some seven centuries of partial
or total disuse.

Through processes which we cannot now follow, our later critics have, I
think, fairly established the proposition, that this book of The Law was
none other than the substance of our book of Deuteronomy, then for the
first time written. The plans of the prophetic reformers had contemplated
the sweeping changes described above, in the interests of an ethical and
spiritual religion. They felt that they were but carrying out the
principles of the nation's great Founder. Of his original conception of
religion, bodied in The Ten Words, their aspirations were the legitimate
historical development; as the leaf and bud are the growth of the far back
roots. This programme of the prophetic reformers, presented in its true
light as a development of the ideas of Moses, was, by the priest Hilkiah,
sent to the king as the law of the nation's Founder, with the results
sketched above.

Read in this light, the book takes on a fresh and fascinating interest. It
marks the organization of the movement toward a higher religion which had
been started by the great prophets of the preceding century. It becomes
the Augsburg Confession of the Jewish Reformation, from which dates the
gradual possession of the institutions of the nation by ethical and
spiritual religion.

The lofty character of this book, the "St. John of the Old Testament," as
Ewald called it, is thus rendered intelligible; as it stands for the
aspirations of the noblest movement in ancient Jewish history. It is the
issue of a long travail of soul to whose words we hearken in such a truth
as this:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy might.

Placed in this position, the book of Deuteronomy becomes the key to
Israel's history, by which criticism is reconstructing that story, on the
lines of the great laws of all life, with most significant consequences to
the cause of religion. The ideas and institutions known to us as The
Mosaic Law come forth now as the crown and culmination of a long historic
development. Israel's story is that of a slow and gradual education under