nd the worship
of all traces of naturalism, which in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and the
Second Book of Kings appear still as the subject-matters of intensest
effort and conflict, are here assumed as operative even back to
patriarchal times. Yet it can reasonably be pleaded that the life-work
of Moses truly involved all this development; and even that Monotheism
(at least, for the times and peoples here concerned) required some such
rules as are assumed by P throughout.

And P gives us the great six days' Creation Story with its splendid
sense of rational order pervasive of the Universe, the work of the
all-reasonable God--its single parts good, its totality very good; and
man and woman springing together from the Creator's will. But the writer
nowhere indicates that he means long periods by the 'days'; each
creation appears as effected in an instant, and these instants as
separated from each other by but twenty-four hours.

In between Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code, or a little later still,
lies probably the composition of three religious works full,
respectively, of exultant thanksgiving, of the noblest insight into the
fruitfulness of suffering, and of the deepest questionings issuing in
childlike trust in God. For an anonymous writer composes (say, in 550
B.C.) the great bulk of the magnificent chapters forty to fifty-five of
our Book of Isaiah--a paean of spiritual exultation over the Jews'
proximate deliverance from exile by the Persian King Cyrus. In 538 B.C.
Cyrus issues the edict for the restoration to Judaea, and in 516 the
Second Temple is dedicated. Within this great Consolation stand (xlii.
1-4; xlix. 1-6; l. 4-9; lii. 13-liii. 12) the four poems on the
Suffering Servant of Yahweh--the tenderest revelation of the Old
Testament--apparently written previously in the Exile, say in 570-560
B.C. The Old Law here reaches to the very feet of the New Law--to the
Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. And the Book of Job,
in its chief constituents (chaps. i-xxxi, xxxviii-xlii), was probably
composed when Greek influences began--say in about 480 B.C., the year of
the battle of Thermopylae. The canonization of this daringly speculative
book indicates finely how sensitive even the deepest faith and holiness
can remain to the apparently unjust distribution of man's earthly lot.

Our second period ends in 444 B.C., when the priest and scribe Ezra
solemnly proclaims, and receives the public subscription to, th