d well-instructed minds first to
accept and then to glory in the progressive nature of Christianity, the
first place must be given to the history of religion itself. The study
of religion's ancient records in ritual, monument and book, and of
primitive faiths still existing among us in all stages of development,
has made clear the general course which man's religious life has traveled
from very childish beginnings until now. From early animism in its
manifold expressions, through polytheism, kathenotheism, henotheism, to
monotheism, and so out into loftier possibilities of conceiving the
divine nature and purpose--the main road which man has traveled in his
religious development now is traceable. Nor is there any place where it
is more easily traceable than in our own Hebrew-Christian tradition. One
of the fine results of the historical study of the Scriptures is the
possibility which now exists of arranging the manuscripts of the Bible in
approximately chronological order and then tracing through them the
unfolding growth of the faiths and hopes which come to their flower in
the Gospel of Christ. Consider, for example, the exhilarating story of
the developing conception of Jehovah's character from the time he was
worshiped as a mountain-god in the desert until he became known as the
"God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."

We are explicitly told that the history of Jehovah's relationship with
Israel began at Sinai and that before that time the Hebrew fathers had
never even heard his name.[6] There on a mountain-top in the Sinaitic
wilderness dwelt this new-found god, so anthropomorphically conceived
that he could hide Moses in a rock's cleft from which the prophet could
not see Jehovah's face but could see his back.[7] He was a god of battle
and the name of an old book about him still remains to us, "The book of
the Wars of Jehovah." [8]

"Jehovah is a man of war:
Jehovah is his name"--[9]

so his people at first rejoiced in him and gloried in his power when he
thundered and lightened on Sinai. Few stories in man's spiritual history
are so interesting as the record of the way in which this mountain-god,
for the first time, so far as we know, in Semitic history, left his
settled shrine, traveled with his people in the holy Ark, became
acclimated in Canaan, and, gradually absorbing the functions of the old
baals of the land, extended his sovereignty over the whole of Palestine.

To be sure, even then h