daptation of Hebrew religion
to the Graeco-Roman world, and later, in the Protestant movement, a
readaptation of the same to what we may call the Teutonic spirit. In the
first adaptation, Hebrew positivism was wonderfully refined, transformed
into a religion of redemption, and endowed with a semi-pagan mythology,
a pseudo-Platonic metaphysics, and a quasi-Roman organisation. In the
second adaptation, Christianity received a new basis and standard in the
spontaneous faith of the individual; and, as the traditions thus
undermined in principle gradually dropped away, it was reduced by the
German theologians to a romantic and mystical pantheism. Throughout its
transformations, however, Christianity remains indebted to the Jews not
only for its founder, but for the nucleus of its dogma, cult, and
ethical doctrine. If the religion of the Jews, therefore, should
disclose its origin, the origin of Christianity would also be manifest.

Now the Bible, when critically studied, clearly reveals the source, if
not of the earliest religion of Israel, at least of those elements in
later Jewish faith which have descended to us and formed the kernel of
Christian revelation. The earlier Hebrews, as their own records depict
them, had a mythology and cultus extremely like that of other Semitic
peoples. It was natural religion--I mean that religion which naturally
expresses the imaginative life of a nation according to the conceptions
there current about the natural world and to the interest then uppermost
in men's hearts. It was a religion without a creed or scripture or
founder or clergy. It consisted in local rites, in lunar feasts, in
soothsayings and oracles, in legends about divine apparitions
commemorated in the spots they had made holy. These spots, as in all the
rest of the world, were tombs, wells, great trees, and, above all, the
tops of mountains.

[Sidenote: Israel's tribal monotheism.]

A wandering tribe, at once oppressed and aggressive, as Israel evidently
was from the beginning is conscious of nothing so much as of its tribal
unity. To protect the tribe is accordingly the chief function of its
god. Whatever character Jehovah may originally have had, whether a
storm-god of Sinai or of Ararat, or a sacred bull, or each of these by
affinity and confusion with the other, when the Israelites had once
adopted him as their god they could see nothing essential in him but his
power to protect them in the lands they had conquered. T