holy
God beyond all comparison. In Him is concentrated all power and the
essence of all things; He is the Author of all existence, the Ruler of
life, who lays down the laws by which man shall live. As the prophet says
to the heathen world: "The gods that have not made the heavens and the
earth, these shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens....
Not like these is the portion of Jacob; for He is the Former of all
things.... The Lord is the true God; He is the living God and the
everlasting King; at His wrath the earth trembleth, and the nations are
not able to abide His indignation."(124)

2. This lofty conception of the Deity forms the essence of Judaism and was
its shield and buckler in its lifelong contest with the varying forms of
heathenism. From the very first the God of Judaism declared war against
them all, whether at any special time the prevailing form was the worship
of many gods, or the worship of God in the shape of man, the perversion of
the purity of God by sensual concepts, or the division of His unity into
different parts or personalities. The Talmudic saying is most striking:
"From Sinai, the Mount of revelation of the only God, there came forth
_Sinah_, the hostility of the nations toward the Jew as the banner-bearer
of the pure idea of God."(125) Just as day and night form a natural
contrast, divinely ordained, so do the monotheism of Israel and the
polytheism of the nations constitute a spiritual contrast which can never
be reconciled.

3. The pagan gods, and to some extent the triune God of the Christian
Church, semi-pagan in origin also, are the outcome of the human spirit's
going astray in its search for God. Instead of leading man upwards to an
ideal which will encompass all material and moral life and lift it to the
highest stage of holiness, paganism led to depravity and discord. The
unrelenting zeal displayed by prophet and law-giver against idolatry had
its chief cause in the immoral and inhuman practices of the pagan
nations--Canaan, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon--in the worship of their
deities.(126) The deification of the forces of nature brutalized the moral
sense of the pagan world; no vice seemed too horrible, no sacrifice too
atrocious for their cults. Baal, or Moloch, the god of heaven, demanded in
times of distress the sacrifice of a son by the father. Astarte, the
goddess of fecundity, required the "hallowing" of life's origin, and this
was done by the most terrible of