sacred name may not in its turn hold the secret of our progress;
whether, from the treasured forces of the past that it gathers into
itself, when the spring time now setting in shall have fully come, it may
not blossom into the religion of the future? A civilization should not be
cut off from the historic seed which lies at the roots of its religion, if
it is to grow unto the harvest.

That in this fidelity to the tradition of their race the religion of the
people of Israel was in the vital processes of growth, through this long
period, we know assuredly from one conclusive fact. Out of this tedious
winter came, suddenly as it seems to us, a rich and beautiful spring. The
epoch of the great prophets, with a new life of thought and aspiration,
breaks in abruptly on this commingling of all sorts of religion within the
precincts of Jehovahism. Even in February the sap is softening and warming
in the veins which show no greening on the tips of the patient trees.
Israel was swelling toward the day that was sure to come, when, lo! the
spring!

IV.

_The era of the great prophets, before the exile:_ B.C. 800-586.

In the southern Pacific, where coral islands are slowly forming beneath
the surface of the sea, he who is curious to study the process of the
making of an island must send the divers down to bring up broken bits of
coral, snatched from the dark depths in a painful labor. After the ocean
mountain thrusts its top above the surface of the sea the work of
exploration is easy enough, and we may walk over hard ground as we study
the new formation in the sunlight. Hitherto, in our desire to learn the
secrets of the growth of Israel, we have been like men peering over the
sides of their tiny boats into the depths of a sea that covers fascinating
mysteries; watching the labors of the adepts who ever and anon bring up to
the light some fresh fragments of a buried world. In the epoch that we
have now reached Israel's growing life lifts itself above the level of
tradition, and stands forth as solid history, on whose firm ground we can
study for ourselves the making of a nation's religion.

Israel's literary period opens for us with the prophets. Literary
fragments float up to us from earlier days, but now, for the first time,
we have whole books about whose date and authorship we are reasonably
certain. The prophets introduced the literary craft. They wrote out, in
their later years, the substance of the messages w