dings must be
satisfactory to the Deity with whom they had just made a solemn covenant
to abolish image-worship. It seems to me that, on a survey of all the
facts of the case, only a very cautious and hypothetical judgment is
justifiable. It may be that Moses profited by the opportunities afforded
him of access to what was best in Egyptian society to become acquainted,
not only with its advanced ethical and legal code, but with the more or
less pantheistic unification of the Divine to which the speculations of
the Egyptian thinkers, like those of all polytheistic philosophers, from
Polynesia to Greece, tend; if indeed the theology of the period of the
nineteenth dynasty was not, as some Egyptologists think, a modification
of an earlier, more distinctly monotheistic doctrine of a long
antecedent age. It took only half a dozen centuries for the theology
of Paul to become the theology of Gregory the Great; and it is possible
that twenty centuries lay between the theology of the first worshippers
in the sanctuary of the Sphinx and that of the priests of Ramses Maimun.

It may be that the ten commandments and the Book of the Covenant are
based upon faithful traditions of the efforts of a great leader to
raise his followers to his own level. For myself, as a matter of pious
opinion, I like to think so; as I like to imagine that, between Moses
and Samuel, there may have been many a seer, many a herdsman such as him
of Tekoah, lonely amidst the hills of Ephraim and Judah, who cherished
and kept alive these traditions. In the present results of Biblical
criticism, however, I can discover no justification for the common
assumption that, between the time of Joshua and that of Rehoboam, the
Israelites were familiar with either the Deuteronomic or the Levitical
legislation; or that the theology of the Israelites, from the king who
sat on the throne to the lowest of his subjects, was in any important
respect different from that which might naturally be expected from their
previous history and the conditions of their existence. But there is
excellent evidence to the contrary effect. And, for my part, I see no
reason to doubt that, like the rest of the world, the Israelites had
passed through a period of mere ghost-worship, and had advanced through
Ancestor-worship and Fetishism and Totemism to the theological level at
which we find them in the books of Judges and Samuel.

All the more remarkable, therefore, is the extraordinary change