it
became doubly dear. The Jews were placed in the midst of an ancient and
highly organized priestly system in Babylonia, whose benefits to culture
and religion they must have noted and pondered. In the national
humiliation and the personal sorrows of such a wholesale carrying away of
a people from their native land, a wide-spread awakening of the inner life
was experienced, a genuine revival of religion. A new wave of prophetic
enthusiasm rose in the strange land, lifting the soul of the nation to
heights of spiritual and ethical religion never reached before.

This revival was stamped with the impress of the intellectual influences
which were working upon the Jews in Babylonia. Some of the extant writings
of this period, alike in literary style, in moral tone and in religious
thought, mark a new era. Israel's genius flowered in this dark night--true
to the mystic character of the race. This highest effort of prophetic
thought and feeling appears to have quickly exhausted itself. In reality,
it followed the usual order of religious movements, and turned into a
priestly organization. The group of prophets around the first Isaiah
prepared the way for the priestly movement that followed a century later.
The group of prophets around the second Isaiah prepared the way for the
priestly movement that followed close in their steps. First comes always,
in religion, an epoch of inspiration, and then comes a period of
organization. The organization never bodies fully the spirit of the
inspiration. The ideal is not realizable in institutions. Institutional
religion is always a compromise, a mediation between the lofty conceptions
and impatient aspirations of the few who inspire the new life, and the low
notions and contented conventionalisms of the many whom they seek to
inspire. The compromise is necessarily of the nature of a reaction; but
the interplay of action and re-action is the law of ethical as of chemical
forces.

Israel really needed the conserving work of a great organization. The
prophetic religion was far in advance of the popular level. The high
thoughts and lofty ideas of the prophets needed to be wrought into a
cultus, which, while not breaking abruptly with the popular religion,
should imbue the conventional forms with deeper ethical and spiritual
meanings; should, through them, systematically train the people in ethical
habits and spiritual conceptions; and should thus gradually educate men
out of these forms t