touch with all manner of races
much more advanced than themselves in material culture, and steeped in
highly developed polytheistic Animism. According to their history, the
Israelites 'went a-whoring' incorrigibly after strange gods. It is
impossible, perhaps, to disentangle the foreign and the native elements.

It may therefore be tentatively suggested that early Israel had its Ahone
in a Being perhaps not yet named Jehovah. Israel entertained, however,
perhaps by reason of 'nomadic habits,' only the scantiest concern about
ancestral ghosts. We then find an historical tradition of secular contact
between Israel and Egypt, from which Israel emerges with Jehovah for God,
and a system of sacrifices. Regarding Jehovah as a revived memory of
the moral Supreme Being whom Israel must have known in extremely remote
ages (unless Israel was less favoured than Australians, Bushmen, or
Andamanese), we might look on the sacrifices to him as an adaptation from
the practices of religion among races more settled than Israel, and more
civilised.[22]

Speculation on subjects so remote must be conjectural, but our suggestion
would, perhaps, account for sacrifices to Jehovah, paid by a race
which, by reason of 'nomadic habits,' was never much given to
ancestor-worship, but had been in contact with great sacrificing,
polytheistic civilisations. Mr. Huxley, however, while he seems to slur
the essential distinction between ghost-gods and the Eternal, grants,
later, that 'there are very few people(s?) without additional gods,
which cannot, with certainty, be accounted for as deified ancestors.'
Ta-li-y-Tooboo, of course, is one of these gods, as is Jehovah. Mr. Huxley
gives no theory of _how_ these gods came into belief, except the
suggestion that 'the polytheistic theology has become modified by the
selection of the cosmic or tribal god, as the only god to whom worship is
due on the part of that nation,' without prejudice to the right of other
nations to worship other gods.[23] This is 'monolatry,' and 'the ethical
code, often of a very high order, comes into closer relation with the
theological creed,' _why_, we are not informed. Nor do we learn out of
what polytheistic deities Jehovah was selected, nor for what reason. The
hypothesis, as usual, breaks down on the close relation between the
ethical code and the theological creed, among low savages, with a
relatively Supreme Being, but without ancestor-worship, and without
polytheistic gods