se of the threads of its history,
ultimately tend to the solution of this great problem."--Ewald: Intro.

A singular succession of great men arise to save and revive and reform
religion in every critical epoch. Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, Ezra, Judas Maccabeus come upon the stage, one after the other,
perform their several parts with singular aptitude, and prepare the way
for the next movement when it comes due. The history of the people rightly
read becomes a mighty drama, in which the right man is never wanting at
the right time, and the action moves on steadily toward a climax.

The experiences of the people, even those most perplexing to the faith of
the nation at the time, fit singularly into this organic evolution of
religion. The rending of the Kingdom of David, that blighted the fair
prospect of a martial empire, turned the nation aside from the false
career on which it was entering. The overthrow of the Northern and then of
the Southern Kingdom, and the deportation of the people to Babylonia,
seemingly the ruin of the sister countries, threw them in upon their inner
life; and in the exile their religion found its highest reach of thought.

Even that hierarchical movement which so quickly followed upon this bloom
of prophetism, and which to the superficial look seems only the arrest of
life and the beginning of death, reveals a legitimate function in the
organic processes of the national religion. In this priestly organization
of institutional religion, all free prophetic inspiration did indeed die
out for over four centuries. But even this was a necessity for the right
flowering of religion. The age was not ready, politically or
intellectually, for the ripening of the thoughts of the prophets. Had they
ripened then, they would have fallen to the ground, as the untimely fruit
of a too-early spring. Four centuries were to be tided over before the
political and intellectual conditions were found for the blossoming of
this flower. This holding back of the normal evolution of Hebraism was the
function of the Priestly Reaction--a curious parallel to the function of
Catholicism in Mediaeval Christianity.

Like the Catholic Church, the Jewish priesthood held society together
when, in the destruction of the political power, there was no other bond
of unity. As in the Catholic Church, the High Priest became a temporal
ruler, the Prince of Israel, as he was called; and kept the sacred city
still