tinued sound amid these
organic changes we may see from several hints preserved by tradition.

The institution, or revival, of the Order of the Nazarites was a
religio-moral movement. It was a protest against the vice of drunkenness
that was increasing in the land, as, relieved from war's alarms and waxing
fat upon their fertile fields, the people gave themselves to pleasure. The
first Prohibition Society, of which we have record, was this Order of the
Nazarites. This Order appears also to have had a still deeper moral aim,
little noticed of old. It was a reaction from the social changes that were
going on in Israel, a protest against the new-fashioned ways of wealth,
an earnest effort to hold to the simplicities of earlier days, to the good
old plain living and high thinking. It was a counter-movement of Old
Israel, essaying to stem the mad rush for riches. A still more convincing
token of the healthy moral tone of the nation is to be found in the
earliest considerable work of literature preserved to us, the Song of
Songs. It holds up to scorn the licentiousness that Solomon had made
fashionable, and of which, in a just retribution, he had become the
abhorred type. The great king fails to corrupt the virtue of a simple
country maiden, despite of all his blandishments. Ewald assigns this poem
to the northern kingdom, which had separated itself from Judah chiefly in
reaction from the Solomonic innovations. It leads us into the homes of the
sturdy peasantry of the hill country, where burned the fires on the altars
of pure wedded love.

From a people thus sound at heart, amid the mellowing richness of
civilization, we may well expect great things in religion. Whatever the
outward forms of religion, its roots ran deep down into the moral law, and
must needs have borne in due time a noble fruitage. There was in fact a
striking development of religion in this period. It was coincident with
the secular development of the nation. This indeed is the general rule of
religious revival. Religion advances with the advancing life of man, each
new and true step forward opening a higher possibility of thought and
feeling concerning God. As Moses the Emancipator was the father of true
religion in Israel, so Samuel the king-maker was its early master. We
cannot now trace clearly his work, but we can see that he was a fresh
ethical and spiritual force, shaping religious life anew.

Prophets there had doubtless been before him, in Israel