nother very useful book, _The Evolution
of the Idea of God_, by the late Grant Allen. In this book Mr. Allen
clearly traces the origins of the various ideas of God, and we hear of
Jehovah again, as a kind of tribal stone idol, carried about in a box or
ark. I will quote as fully as space permits:

But Jahweh was an object of portable size, for, omitting for
the present the descriptions in the Pentateuch--which seem
likely to be of later date, and not too trustworthy, through
their strenuous Jehovistic editing--he was carried from Shiloh
in his ark to the front during the great battle with the
Philistines at Ebenezer; and the Philistines were afraid, for
they said, "A god is come into the camp." But when the Philistines
captured the ark, the rival god, Dagon, fell down and broke in
pieces--so Hebrew legend declared--before the face of Jahweh.
After the Philistines restored the sacred object, it rested for
a time at Kirjath-jearim till David, on the capture of Jerusalem
from the Jebusites, went down to that place to bring up from
thence the ark of the god; and as it went, on a new cart, they
"played before Jahweh on all manner of instruments," and David
himself "danced before Jahweh."... The children of Israel in
early times carried about with them a tribal god, Jahweh, whose
presence in their midst was intimately connected with a certain
ark or chest containing a stone object or objects. This chest
was readily portable, and could be carried to the front in case
of warfare. They did not know the origin of the object in the
ark with certainty; but they regarded it emphatically as "Jahweh
their god, which led them out of the land of Egypt."...

I do not see, therefore, how we can easily avoid the obvious
inference that Jahweh the god of the Hebrews, who later became
sublimated and etherealised into the God of Christianity, was,
in his origin, nothing more nor less than the ancestral sacred
stone of the people of Israel, however sculptured, and, perhaps,
in the very last resort of all, the unhewn monumental pillar of
some early Semitic sheikh or chieftain.

It was, indeed, as the Rev. C. E. Beeby says, in his book _Creed and
Life_, a sad mistake of St. Augustine to tack this tribal fetish in his
box on to the Christian religion as the All-Father, and Creator of the
Universe. F