-worship, and, uniting with the worship of the highest God, Baal
and Bel, that of a female divinity under the names of Baaltis, Beltis,
Aschera, Mylitta, they made religion to consist in the sacrifice of
chastity to the will of the Deity, as the fruitful, productive power of
nature, and thus fell into gross immorality.[10]

Religion appears in another form among the Semites in the worship of the
stars among the Babylonians and ancient Arabians. This astrolatry,
originally a kind of fetichism, became nature-worship, and gradually
rose to the worship of the intelligence manifested to our contemplation
in the movement of the heavenly luminaries. Astrology arose, and
religion no longer expressed itself in passive acquiescence, but was
united with the effort to guide the life by the knowledge to be drawn,
as men imagined, from the motion of the stars.

ISRAELITISH RELIGION.

_a. Its origin. The patriarchal religion. Mosaism. Prophetism._

While most of the Semitic nations, in opposition to the effort to
elevate God above nature as lord and governor, returned to the old
nature-religion with its grossly sensual worship of the divine, and
others got no farther than to the conception of a deity, who, like a
consuming fire, stood opposed to nature, and was to be appeased and
propitiated by human sacrifices, there was developed among the
Israelitish people, gradually and in constantly higher measure, in
connection with a higher moral and religious disposition, the worship of
God as a being who, though distinct from nature, is yet not opposed to
it, and thus no longer demands human sacrifices, but obedience and moral
consecration.

The common origin of the religion of the Israelites and that of their
Semitic relations, though hardly evident even in the oldest monuments of
the Hebrew literature, appears from the following facts and particulars:
firstly, the composition of Israelitish names not only with El, but also
with Baal, such as Jerubbaal (adversary of Baal), (Gideon),[11]
Esbaal,[12] Meribbaal,[13] names which afterwards, on account of the
aversion which the ever-increasing distance in religion between the
Israelitish nation and the nations related to it must, from the nature
of the case, have inspired against the name of Baal, are changed into
Jerubboseth,[14] Isboseth,[15] and Mephiboseth[16], as also the
interchanging of El and Baal,[17] of Baal-jada[18] and Eljada,[19] seem
to point to an ancient period when the