;
they imposed deadly penalties and bitter hatred on all who deviated from
the established religion. All this was the work of centuries, and its
important result was that by a manifold and perpetual drill certain
religious ideas were stamped upon the minds of the people, until beliefs
and usages and sentiments ran in their very blood and were transmitted
from father to son.

As types of the Hebrew religion in its advancing stages we may note:
first, Jacob, winning his way by craft and subtlety, gaining the favor of
his god by a fidelity which expresses itself by vows and sacrifices and
scarcely at all by morality; and hardly attractive except in the
tenderness of his family relations. A mythical figure, he is a marvelous
embodiment of the persistent race-traits of the Jew--tenacity, craft,
devoutness--in the early phase. It is a very earthly phase, but with the
germs of a marvelous development. Later, we have David, the warrior
king. Still later comes Elijah, the prophet of a Deity who now stands
for chastity and justice against gods of sensuality and cruelty, and
defying wicked kings in the name of that God. Then in the line of
prophets we may pass to their greatest, Isaiah,--both first and second of
the name,--each of whom in the deepest adversity of the people is
inspired by a hope, vague in its expectation, but so deep, so fervid, so
sweet, that to this day it lends its language to hearts which in darkness
look for the morning. Next we may take Ezra, rebuilding the shattered
nationality, not on a political basis, but by a law of personal conduct
in which a genuine morality is mixed with a ceremonial code. And here
really belongs the legislation ascribed to Moses and given in the
Pentateuch; the law-giver having an original in some great, dim, historic
figure, long treasured in the popular imagination, but rehabilitated by
priestly art as the author of a great volume of minute legislation, to
which dignity is lent by the legends of a personality sublime yet meek.
We have then the flowering of the inner life, in the book of Psalms,--the
single name of the Psalmist covering the products of many minds and
successive generations. In the course of affairs, the hero's place
belongs next to Judas Maccabaeus, the patriot leader against the heathen
Greek; and we may take the books of the Maccabees and the book of Daniel
as giving the ideal thought of the period,--the matrix of belief and hope
from which was to spri