plore his assistance through the intercession of
saints. It is the war-cry of old: "_The Lord is a Man of War!_"

But the moral sense, the Divinity within, as contrasted with the
Divinity in the skies, tells the poet that this old-world god is an
idol, a glorified image of man in his "violent youth," a "giant shadow
hailed Divine".

Not him that with fantastic boasts
A sombre people dreamed they knew;
The mere barbaric God of Hosts
That edged their sword and braced their thew:
A God they pitted 'gainst a swarm
Of neighbour gods less vast of arm.

He is well known, this "God of Hosts". Doubtless once he was the
Divinity of the worlds that stream across our sky, subsequently
transformed into the god of battles, who ranged himself on the side of
his favourites, baffled their foes by super-human strategy or even
knavery, the god of carnage and bloodshed, progenitor, in direct line,
of him who afterwards was preached as the god of devil and hell. What
has taught the poet, what has taught man to disavow such a Divinity?--

A God like some imperious King,
Wroth, were his realm not duly awed;
A God for ever hearkening
Unto his self-commanded laud;
A God for ever jealous grown
Of carven wood and graven stone.

No church, no official religion, no cleric or synod of ministers
appears to have raised a hand to inaugurate the emancipation of the
Western world from its degrading belief in a "God of Hosts". It is
only now, during the last thirty or forty years, that stragglers here
and there are coming into camp and making their submission to the
"sovereignty of ethics," the supremacy of the moral law, which dooms to
eternal death divinities such as Odin, Jahveh and Zeus. It is to the
emancipation of the conscience of humanity from the paralysing guidance
of the great ecclesiastical corporations of the past that we owe that
famous band of scholars, who, antecedently convinced on moral grounds
that such conceptions of the Divine were sheer profanities, set about
an exhaustive study of the origins and text of the biblical literature,
together with an equally painstaking research into the history of
kindred religions, which has resulted in the vindication of the root
doctrine of prophetic and ethical religion--the absolute and unlimited
sovereignty of the moral law, and the consequent identification of
morality with religion. They have made sacerdotal, sacrificial
religion an impossibili