uman life with the growth of man
himself. It is coarse, crude and cruel while man is a savage, and as he
becomes civilized--by which I mean something more than wealthy--it becomes
intelligent, reasonable ethical and spiritual. The growth of Israel from
barbarism carried with this progress the growth of Israel's religion. In
the earliest times which we can historically reach the Israelites were
semi-nomadic tribes, slightly distinguishable from their kindred Semites.
The religion of the people appears to have been then a commingling of
fetichism, the worship of things that impressed the imagination, great
trees and huge boulders, with the worship of the various powers of nature,
the orbs of heaven, the reproductive force of the earth, etc., under the
usual savage and sensual symbolisms.

From such unpromising beginnings, through the successive stages of
polytheistic idolatries, religion was gradually led up, in the advance of
the general life of the people and through the inspirations of a series of
great men, to the recognition of One Eternal and infinite Being; the Lord
of nature and of man, the Father of all mankind, Holy, Just and Gracious;
whose truest worship is the aspirations of his children after goodness.

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord," writes the
Deuteronomist; "and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine
heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might."

Malachi, looking round upon the manifold forms of worship of the various
nations, and discerning that through them all the soul of man was feeling
after one and the same Divine Being, makes God say:

"From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my
name is great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense is offered
unto me and a pure offering; for my name is great among the heathen,
saith the Lord of Hosts."

Micah asks,

"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy
and to walk humbly with thy God?"

Of this continuous growth of religion the Old Testament is the record.

5. _Israel's literature records the forcing forward of this growth of
religion, as by some Power back of man, shaping its ends, rough-hew them
as it might._

The Niebuhr of Hebrew history rightly pointed out this significant fact in
the introduction to his great work.

"The manifold changes and even confusions and perversities, which
manifest themselves in the long cour