st consent, for our present purpose, to suspend their faith in this
doctrine, and provisionally to look at the Old Testament with the same
impartial though friendly scrutiny with which we have regarded the sacred
books of other nations. Not a little will be gained for the Jewish
Scriptures by this position. If they lose the authority which attaches to
the Word of God, they will gain the interest which belongs to the
utterance of man.

While M. Renan finds the source of Hebrew monotheism in a like tendency in
the whole Semitic race,--a supposition which we have seen to be
contradicted by the facts,--Max Mueller regards the true origin of this
tendency to be in Abraham himself, the friend of God, and Father of the
Faithful. He calls attention to the fact that both Moses and Christ, and
subsequently Mohammed, preached no new God, but the God of Abraham.
"Thus," says he, "the faith in the one living God, which seemed to require
the admission of a monotheistic instinct grafted in every member of the
Semitic family, is traced back to one man." He adds his belief that this
faith of Abraham in one supreme God came to him by a special revelation.

And if, by a special revelation, is meant a grand profound insight, an
inspired vision of truth, so deep and so living as to make it a reality
like that of the outward world, then we see no better explanation of the
monotheism of the Hebrews than this conviction transmitted from Abraham
through father and son, from generation to generation.

For the most curious fact about this Jewish people is, that every one of
them[348] is a child of Abraham. All looked back with the same ancestral
pride to their great progenitor, the friend of God. This has never been
the case with any other nation, for the Arabs are not a nation. One can
hardly imagine a greater spur to patriotism than this union of pride of
descent with pride in one's nation and its institutions. The proudest and
poorest Jew shared it together. There was one distinction, and that the
most honorable, which belonged equally to all.

We have seen that, in all the Semitic nations, behind the numerous divine
beings representing the powers of nature, there was dimly visible one
Supreme Being, of whom all these were emanations. The tendency to lose
sight of this First Great Cause, so common in the race, was reversed in
Abraham. His soul rose to the contemplation of the Perfect Being, above
all, and the source of all. With passionate l