never lost the germ begotten
in the soul of the race, which held the promise and potency of the future.

But around Jehovah, as the supreme God of the race, the people still
continued to group their ancient divinities, and to worship them in the
old-time manner. The religion of a people in any stage of its history is
always a composite; a succession of layers that correspond to the
intellectual and moral classifications of society. But the proportion of
the true religion rises with a progressive civilization. In these
semi-civilized tribes the religion of the bulk of the people, in all
probability, corresponded with the ideas and forms of worship of other
peoples in the same stage of development In the lowest stratum fetichism
lingered on, the worship of any unusual thing that excited the wonder of a
simple people. Great trees of immemorial age, huge boulders standing
strangely in fertile valleys, continued the objects of superstitious awe.
Jehovahism took up these remnants of fetichism into its higher life, when
it found that they could not be dispossessed, just as Christianity did
long afterward with pagan customs, and gave them a higher significance in
connection with the worship of Jehovah.[39]

Higher strata of the people worshipped the various powers of nature, the
sun, the moon, the stars, after much the same fashion in vogue among their
kindred Semites.[40] Even the revolting rites of the surrounding
nature-worships were not lacking in Israel. While the gentle and gracious
warmth of the spring sun called forth the happy adoration of the people,
the scorching and consuming heat of the midsummer sun roused the fears of
the sufferers for their crops, their cattle, and their very lives. They
sought to propitiate this fierce Power, which was evidently hostile to
man, with offerings of the life it devoured so pitilessly. The choicest
lives--the first-born son, the fairest maiden of the village--were
sacrificed to glut its greed of death. Into the fiery arms of Moloch
parents laid the children of their love. Human sacrifices were
unquestionably a recognized form of worship during this period, at least
in times of deep distress.[41] The libertine longings of nature, the free
fecundities of mother-earth, imaged to the grosser people the Power
working round about them and within their very bodies; and men and women
gave free rein to their appetites and passions, in honor of divinities
like Ashera, the Syrian Venus.[42] T