st
the presentation of inconsistent and probably baseless critical hypotheses
in the dogmatic brevity of cheap handbooks.

Yet again, whence comes the moral element in Jehovah? Mr. Huxley thinks
that it possibly came from the ethical practice and theory of Egypt. In
the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 'a sort of Guide to Spirit Land,' there
are moral chapters; the ghost tells his judges in Amenti what sins he has
_not_ committed. Many of these sins are forbidden in the Ten Commandments.

They are just as much forbidden in the nascent morality of savage peoples.
Moses did not need the Book of the Dead to teach him elementary morals.
From the mysteries of Mtanga he might have learned, also, had he been
present, the virtue of unselfish generosity. If the creed of Jehovah, or
of El, retained only as much of ethics as is under divine sanction among
the Kurnai, adaptation from the Book of the Dead was superfluous.

The care for the departed, the ritual of the Ka, the intense
pre-occupation with the future life, which, far more than its morality,
are the essential characteristics of the Book of the Dead--Israel cared
for none of these animistic things, brought none of these, or very little
of these, out of the land of Egypt. Moses was certainly very eclectic; he
took only the morality of Egypt. But as Mr. Huxley advances this opinion
tentatively, as having no secure historical authority about Moses, it
hardly answers our question, Whence came the moral element in Jehovah? One
may surmise that it was the survival of the primitive divinely sanctioned
ethics of the ancient savage ancestors of the Israelite, known to them,
as to the Kurnai, before they had a pot, or a bronze knife, or seed to
sow, or sheep to herd, or even a tent over their heads. In the counsels of
eternity Israel was chosen to keep burning, however obscured with smoke
of sacrifice, that flame which illumines the darkest places of the earth,
'a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel'--a
flame how litten a light whence shining, history cannot inform us, and
anthropology can but conjecture. Here scientific nescience is wiser than
the cocksureness of popular science, with her ghosts and fetish-stones,
and gods that sprang from ghosts, which ghosts, however, could not be
developed, owing to nomadic habits.

It appears, then, if our general suggestion meets with any acceptance,
that what occurred in the development of Hebrew religion was precis