ls as we know them,
we never should have educated the world thus; and we do not see why it
should thus have been done. But we are very anthropomorphic, and totally
ignorant of the conditions of the problem.

An example of anthropological theory concerning Jehovah was put forth by
Mr. Huxley.[1] Mr. Huxley's general idea of religion as it is on the
lowest known level of material culture--through which the ancestors of
Israel must have passed like other people--has already been criticised.
He denied to the most backward races both cult and religious sanction of
ethics. He was demonstrably, though unconsciously, in error as to the
facts, and therefore could not start from the idea that Israel, in the
lowest historically known condition of savagery, possessed, or, like other
races, might possess, the belief in an Eternal making for righteousness.
'For my part,' he says, 'I see no reason to doubt that, like the
rest of the world, the Israelites had passed through a period of mere
ghost-worship, and had advanced through ancestor-worship and Fetishism and
Totemism to the theological level at which we find them in the Books of
Judges and Samuel.'[2]

But why does he think the Israelites did all this? The Hebrew ghosts,
abiding, according to Mr. Huxley, in a rather torpid condition in Sheol,
would not be of much practical use to a worshipper. A reference in
Deuteronomy xxvi. 14 (Deuteronomy being, _ex hypothesi_, a late pious
imposture) does not prove much. The Hebrew is there bidden to remind
himself of the stay of his ancestors in Egypt, and to say, 'Of the
hallowed things I have not given aught for the dead'--namely, of the
tithes dedicated to the Levites and the poor. A race which abode for
centuries among the Egyptians, as Israel did--among a people who
elaborately fed the _kas_ of the departed--might pick up a trace of a
custom, the giving of food for the dead, still persevered in by St. Monica
till St. Ambrose admonished her. But Mr. Huxley is hard put to it for
evidence of ancestor-worship or ghost-worship in Israel when he looks for
indications of these rites in 'the singular weight attached to the
veneration of parents in the Fourth Commandment.'[3] The _Fourth_
Commandment, of course, is a slip of the pen. He adds: 'The Fifth
Commandment, as it stands, would be an excellent compromise between
ancestor-worship and Monotheism.' Long may children practise this
excellent compromise! It is really too far-fetched to reason