s of One Being, lapsed into
names of various beings. Hence arose a danger which threatened
well-nigh to bar to the Semitic race the approach to the conception
and worship of the One God.

Nowhere can we see this danger more clearly than in the history of the
Jews. The Jews had, no doubt, preserved, from the beginning the idea
of God, and their names of God contained nothing but what might by
right be ascribed to Him. They worshipped a single God, and, whenever
they fell into idolatry, they felt that they had fallen away from God.
But that God, under whatever name they invoked Him, was especially
their God, their own national God, and His existence did not exclude
the existence of other gods or demons. Of the ancestors of Abraham and
Nachor, even of their father Terah, we know that in old time, when
they dwelt on the other side of the flood, they served other gods
(Joshua xxiv. 2). At the time of Joshua these gods were not yet
forgotten, and instead of denying their existence altogether, Joshua
only exhorts the people to put away the gods which their fathers
served on the other side of the flood and in Egypt, and to serve the
Lord: 'Choose ye this day,' he says, 'whom you will serve; whether the
gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the
flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell; but as
for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.'

Such a speech, exhorting the people to make their choice between
various gods, would have been unmeaning if addressed to a nation which
had once conceived the unity of the Godhead. Even images of the gods
were not unknown to the family of Abraham, for, though we know nothing
of the exact form of the teraphim, or images which Rachel stole from
her father, certain it is that Laban calls them his gods (Genesis
xxxi. 19, 30). But what is much more significant than these traces of
polytheism and idolatry is the hesitating tone in which some of the
early patriarchs speak of their God. When Jacob flees before Esau into
Padan-Aram and awakes from his vision at Bethel, he does not profess
his faith in the One God, but he bargains, and says, 'If God will be
with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me
bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my
father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God: and this
stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God's house: and of all
that thou shalt give me, I will surely give