her gods,(266) the monotheism of the Book is
strenuously moral and warmly spiritual. The God of Israel is to be served
and loved because He is Love--the One and Only God not more by His
Righteousness and His Power than by His Grace, manifest as all three have
been throughout His dealings with Israel. The worship of other gods is
forbidden and so is every attempt to represent Himself in a material form.
His ritual is purged of foolish, unclean and cruel elements. Witchcraft
and necromancy are utterly condemned.

_Second_--and this is original to Deuteronomy--The One Altar, at that time
an inevitable corollary both to the need for purity in the worship of God
and to the truth of His Unity. The long license of sacrifices at a
multitude of shrines had resulted not only in the debasement of His
worship, but in the popular confusion of Himself with a number of local
deities.(267) The removal of the high-places, the concentration of
sacrifice upon One Altar had, by the bitter experience of centuries,
become a religious and an ethical necessity.

_Third_, The One People. Save for possible proselytes from the
neighbouring heathen, Israel is alone legislated for--a free nation owning
no foreign king as it bows to no foreign deity, but governing itself in
obedience to the revealed Will of its own God. This Will is applied to
every detail of its life in as comprehensive a system of national religion
as the world has known. And thus next to devotion to the Deity comes pride
in the nation. Because of their possession of the Divine Law Israel are
_the_ righteous people and wise above all others. The patriotism of the
Book must have been one cause of its immediate acceptance by the people,
when Josiah brought it before them and upon it they made Covenant with
their God. Throughout the Book treats the nation as a moral unit. It
enforces indeed justice as between man and man. It gives woman a higher
position than is assumed for her by other Hebrew codes. It cares for the
individual poor, stranger, debtor and dependent priest with a humanity all
its own, and it exhorts to the education of children. Above all it forbids
base thoughts as well as base deeds. Yet, while thus enforcing the
elements of a searching personal morality, Deuteronomy deals with the
individual only through his relations to the nation and the national
worship. The Book has no promise for the individual beyond the grave. Nor
is there pity nor charity for other peoples n