Religion not Centralised.—We must not, however, suppose that the rise of Jehovah to a great position, and the institution of his worship at the court, made any great or sudden change in the religious arrangements of the people at large. While the worship of the monarch went on at Gibeon or at Jerusalem, the great shrines at Bethel, at Dan, and at Beersheba were still frequented, and the sacred places throughout the land remained in honour. Stories indeed were told to show that they had been founded by the patriarchs for the worship of their god, so that there need be no scruple in frequenting them. The worship of Baal and that of Jehovah went on at these places side by side, and neither could fail to be influenced by the other. Sacrifice was guided by more than one principle: on the one hand it was a common meal with the deity; and as Jehovah was thought to have his dwelling in Heaven, his part of the banquet was burned, so that it might ascend to him in the column of smoke. The sacrifice of agriculturists, however, naturally turns to the idea of presenting to the god, with joy and thankfulness, a part of the gifts, or the first or best part of the gifts, which, as lord of the soil, he has bestowed. The idea of propitiation or atonement does not enter into the ordinary sacrifices at this time. Jehovah in his sterner moods may demand more awful offerings. As we see from the story of Abraham offering up Isaac, it was thought that Jehovah might demand human sacrifice, and instances of such sacrifice actually occur in the records. Jephthah dedicates his daughter; after a war the best of the booty is offered to Jehovah, and Samuel hews Agag in pieces before him. But such occurrences lie quite apart from ordinary worship, which is of a joyful character and is accompanied by merry-making of various kinds. No fixed ritual prevailed throughout the country; the attempt to introduce uniformity came much later. Every one knew how to sacrifice, as the stories of Manoah and of Gideon show; it was by no means necessary that a priest should be present. The functions of the priest indeed were often connected with other matters than sacrifice, and might be of a humble description. Eli with a few attendants was the guardian of the ark which was the symbol of the presence of Jehovah. A young priest was engaged by Micah for ten pieces of silver yearly to take charge of his collection of idols. But the most important duty of the priesthood, and that on which their influence mainly depended, was that of consulting Jehovah and ascertaining his will. This was done by some sacred object in the charge of the priest, and various objects are named (Ephod and Teraphim are images of deities; Urim and Thummim are the lots used on such occasions) which possessed this virtue. The priest also acted as a judge in matters brought to him for decision, and thus was in a position to form the unwritten law of the people, and to set up principles of conduct which came in course of time to be regarded as sacred. The priests' "torah" or law is the beginning of the Jewish legislation, and we see from the humane and kindly provisions of the earliest codes that this important function was discharged in no unworthy way. It was thus that Jehovah acted as the living lawgiver of his people, long before any written law existed. With his character as a warrior, a mighty lord, and a giver of rich gifts, he combines from the first that of one who watches over the conduct of his people, checks their excesses, and is willing and able to lead them on to better living. This fact will be of much importance when the mind of the people expands and seeks to understand more clearly his being and character.

The Prophets.—Israel, like other nations of antiquity, had, in addition to the priests who were professionally connected with religion, a class of men who were organs of the deity not on account of their position but by a special personal gift. The inspiration of Jehovah appeared in early times in somewhat crude forms. Bands of fervid devotees were seen, who produced in themselves by dance and song an ecstatic enthusiasm, in which they were thought to become the organs of the deity. These men lived in societies or guilds, which were found in Israel for several centuries. There were such prophets of Baal as well as of Jehovah, so that the phenomenon is not specifically Israelite. What we hear of them does not always give us a lofty idea of their character. They are found practising magical tricks, and when they prophesy they all say the same thing; sometimes they are willing to prophesy what a king wishes to hear.

The greater prophecy of Israel arose out of such beginnings as these. Israel was accustomed to expect to hear the will of Jehovah declared by a speaker of whom the spirit had laid hold, and among those who came forward to meet this expectation there appeared from time to time men of commanding insight and of great intensity of character. The name "seer" indicates the nature of this kind of prophecy. The seer is one to whom Jehovah communicates his intentions personally, perhaps without any steps having been taken on his part to place himself in the way of the god. He sees visions while awake and in his ordinary frame of mind, he also hears what others do not hear; and the vision and the message have reference to the future. Things are intimated which are shortly to come to pass, and they are things concerning the state or the monarchy: the fate of Israel is the burden of the prophet's intimation. Samuel's seeing led him to institute the monarchy under Saul. The prophet Abijah declared for the division of the kingdom into two; and his prophecy was not vain. Elijah foretold the downfall of the house of Omri, and Elisha saw to the accomplishment of that prediction. The prophets we see were a great power in public affairs, and were able in important crises to determine the course of the nation's history. Often the prophet stands quite alone, and in opposition to the court and apparently to the nation, and yet his words have a tendency to get themselves fulfilled; Jehovah's word does not return to him void. At other times the prophet seems to have many sympathisers among the nation, and to speak as the mouthpiece of the most earnest section of the community, the section most devoted to Jehovah; and in these cases it is less wonderful that his words come true. When, however, we speak of the prophets as a whole, the expression is a loose one; the prophets are not a party that always acts together, nor a school in which the leader is always sure of a following. A great voice sounds, perhaps once in a century or a half-century; and these voices represent the true tradition of Israelite religion, and develop it further. In the time of Elijah we notice that there is a puritan movement in Israel; a number of men are agreed together in detestation of the foreign worships which are practised at court, and are heartily agreed in wishing to bring back the good old ways and the pure worship of Jehovah only. And when Elijah speaks, he gives voice to this tendency; he claims that everything should be determined by religion; no considerations of state should for a moment stand in the way of the pure faith of Jehovah, by which everything should be decided; and whatever stands in the way of this policy is dedicated to destruction. This, broadly speaking, is the keynote of Hebrew prophecy.

When we come to the canonical prophets, however, we feel that there is a great deal more in their teaching than the bare demand that everything must give way to the requirements of religion. A great change has taken place in their world of thought. It is no less than that a new god and a new religion have announced themselves in the thinking of these men. They do not say so; they are not aware of it, and yet it is so.

The Old Religion National.—The religion of Israel during the monarchy is, in the full sense of the term, a national one. From a cluster of tribes Israel has become a nation, and has begun to think of itself as a unity. It has its national history, its national rulers, as other nations have. In their nationality it cannot be denied that the Israelites had much to be proud of; nor did their rapid growth in wealth and power, which gave them several centuries of prosperity, tend to lesson that pride. Now as they have their own king, they have also their own god. Jehovah is the god of Israel; Israel is the people of Jehovah, on this they were all agreed. That Jehovah was their god did not prevent them from believing in the existence of other gods: Chemosh was the god of Moab, a being not very unlike Jehovah, the Baals were the old gods of Canaan. Jehovah, of course, was the greatest and strongest, and an Israelite should worship him, in Canaan at least; but there was no great harm if he worshipped other gods too, when it came in his way to do so. He might join in the worship of Baal in country places; and the king might, without doing any harm, set up the images of the gods of his wives beside the images of Jehovah in the capital, and if many of his subjects joined in these other worships, it was but natural. In this way a great variety of gods was in some reigns brought together from different countries.

Jehovah, however, was the special god of Israel, there could be no doubt of that; Israel was specially pledged to him; and he on his side was pledged to Israel, who was entitled to look to him for help in every emergency. Jehovah had no other people; he was entirely bound up with Israel, he must, if only for his own honour, come to the aid of his own people when they needed him. He never could permit Israel to suffer any fatal injury, such as deportation to a foreign country. Religious faith forbade the thought that such a thing was possible; if Israel was destroyed, where would Israel's religion be? It was utter impiety, therefore, to doubt that Israel was safe, that Jehovah watched over his own land and his own people, or that he would guard them from any fatal harm. If, on the other hand, as was too often the case, Israel had to submit to injury and insult from other peoples, there could be no doubt that Jehovah took notice of the fact, and that in due time he would set things right. It might be some time before his attention was sufficiently directed to the case; he might be waiting till more of the same kind of occurrences took place before he finally interposed; but the time would come, the "Day of the Lord" would arrive in due season, when the spoilers and insulters of Israel would be dealt with according to their deserts, and Israel set on high in full deliverance and peace.

Criticism of the Old Religion by the Prophets.—The prophets, impressed more deeply than the people by the moral character of Jehovah, and under the pressure of great national dangers and calamities, attained to views of God and of his ways so different from those current at the time as to appear, when first produced, most unpatriotic and even impious. In their character of seers they foresaw with clearness the terrible catastrophes which were about to burst upon their people. Amos prophesies that Israel will be carried away captive out of his land; Isaiah announces the same thing in the southern kingdom, and declares that only a remnant shall return. These men are in no doubt as to the impending political annihilation of Israel, and they set themselves to find some reason for an occurrence so portentous, so impossible to harmonise with ordinary religious faith. They account for it by a view of the nature of Jehovah far exalted above that of their people. He is punishing them for their iniquities, they say, he is so righteous that he must punish sin, and he must punish the sin of Israel his beloved people not less strictly, but more strictly than that of other peoples. As a husband whose wife has gone astray must subject her to discipline before he can receive her again to his favour, so Hosea, made a prophet by such a domestic affliction, contends that Jehovah cannot but deal strictly with Israel. This theory of the meaning of the impending calamities is supported by the prophets by those denunciations of the national sins which give so gloomy a complexion to their works. Among the national delinquencies the disorganisation and apparent wilfulness shown in worship have a prominent place. Worship is not what the service of Jehovah ought to be. Other beings than he are sought after; heathenish festivals are kept, the indecent practices of heathen worship are introduced into that of Jehovah: there is no seriousness, no dignity, no worthy order, in the acts of worship that are done. Any place does for them, and many of the places used are quite unfit, from their associations, for the service of Jehovah. They are celebrated more as wild orgies than as solemn approaches to the deity.

The interests of the prophets, however, do not centre in ritual. The worship of other gods than Jehovah, or the service of Jehovah in unfitting ways, they could not but denounce, but they have no positive instructions to give about worship. When the people have apparently given up the wrong worships, and are applying themselves with zeal to that of Jehovah, seeking his favour by austerities, or by costly offerings, the prophets are no less severe on this line of conduct. Every one is familiar with the passages in which they apparently denounce sacrifice altogether as a thing God has never asked, and by which Israel cannot hope to win his favour. These passages do not prove that the prophets desired the entire discontinuance of sacrifice; they merely compare sacrifice with another line of duty which is said to be vastly more important. Not sacrifice but mercy, not sacrifice but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God,—is the burden of these utterances. Even more than by the irregularities of worship, the prophets are shocked by the more directly moral shortcomings of their people. The people are accused of all the acts that are forbidden in the decalogue of Exodus xx., and of many offences not there named. Especially are the prophets indignant at the hardheartedness of the rich towards the poor, and at the frequent disregard of faith and truth; oppression and bribery, gluttony and other luxurious excesses, are frequently their mark. These most of all are the sins which have called down the divine judgments; these are the transgressions which make it impossible for Jehovah to turn away the punishment of Israel and of Judah. He is, above all things, a righteous god, who loves judgment and mercy, and a people which so manifestly fails to practice justice and mercy cannot continue to be his people; he must destroy them.

The prophets therefore declare that Jehovah has decided on the rejection of his people. This shows that they have advanced to a new conception of what Jehovah is. To them he is something more than the mere national deity indissolubly linked to the fortunes of his people, pledged to advance them in the world, and doomed when they fall to fall himself along with them. He is first of all a moral ruler; the maintenance and promotion of righteousness is far more to him than the prosperity of any single people, even of Israel. He loves Israel it is true; Israel is his son, whom he loves, the wife of his youth, the people of his covenant. But that makes it the more and not the less necessary that Israel should not be allowed to go on in iniquity. Jehovah can be no partisan of a people that does not walk according to his laws. Thus the prophets have arrived at a new conception of Jehovah's character, which necessarily unfits him, though they do not yet see this, for the role of a national god. They have identified him with the ideal of righteousness and mercy, and in so doing they have made the great step, at least in principle, from national to universal religion, from the religion that is bound up with the history of one particular people, and cannot pass beyond them, to the religion which is capable of being understood by all men, and fit to be preached to all men of whatever race.

Appearance of Universalism.—To the deeper view which they have gained of the character of Jehovah the prophets add a wider and higher view of his relation to the world, and to the various nations in it. They frankly state that Jehovah has relations to other nations than Israel. He might if he had chosen have taken some other race to be his people; they were all at his disposal and he regarded none of them as hostile. He is not dependent on Israel, and the inference is clear, that if he could have done without Israel at first, he could do without Israel still, were he driven to that. Israel is not indispensable to the continuance of the true religion. Jehovah indeed has a position far above that which Israelite national thought ascribed to him. He is lord not of one nation only, but of all the nations. He can use any of them as his instrument when and as he chooses. It is he who has brought each of them to its present seat, it is he who is directing their movements now. And for what end does he wield this mighty rule? He is governing the world not in the interests of one nation only, but in the interests of righteousness. He is guiding the destinies of nations so as to bring about an end which he has fixed, namely the establishment of a world-wide kingdom of truth. The day is indeed coming as the Israelites believed when he would hold a judgment over the world, only let Israel beware lest that day should be darkness and not light to them; it will bring about the punishment of sinners of whatever race. An end is to be made of sin both in Israel and in other nations, that a new world may begin. The position thus given to Jehovah is clearly one which lifts him high above the rank of a national deity. The prophets understand with growing clearness that Jehovah is the creator of the world, and the author of all the glories, both of the celestial and of the terrestrial frame. The Maker of the ends of the earth, and the Governor of all the nations, though he has chosen to reveal himself to one particular race, cannot be limited to them. The position of Monotheism has been attained. The earlier prophets speak of the gods of other nations as if they really existed, though for Israel Jehovah is the only god, but by degrees the advance is made to the position that these beings do not exist at all, and are simply "vanities" or "nothings." Instead of saying that Jehovah is the greatest among the gods, and that there is none like him, these preachers say that Jehovah alone is god, and that he is the author of all that exists and of all that takes place in the universe. A god has been unveiled whom all beings exist to glorify, and whom all the nations of the earth can confidently be summoned to praise.

Ethical Monotheism.—These results were reached gradually: there is a great difference between the teaching of Amos and that of Jeremiah. And it must be remembered that they were attained not as other monotheisms have been, by philosophical speculation, but by purely moral ways. It is because Jehovah is supremely just and holy, that he grows so great. The justice and holiness which are seen in him are the strongest of all; the world exists for nothing else but to realise them, and everything that stands opposed to them, whether in Israel or in any other nation, must go down before them. It is in this way that the conclusion is reached that Jehovah is the only God. The moral ideal must be one. The whole of the religion of the prophets is governed by moral considerations. God asks from man nothing but goodness; the true sacrifices are those of the heart and conduct. Man's intercourse with God is to be kept up as that of an affectionate human relationship, into which no motives either of force or of commerce enter. Although God is so just and holy, he is perfectly placable, and ready to greet the approaches which are made to him. It is absurd to spend so much money and toil on sacrifice, when the happiest relations with God can be attained so much more simply. God forgives without any sacrifice; his love and his desire to meet with love surpass all that human relationships can show; his constancy is like that of the returning seasons, or of the stars. He yearns over Israel as a father over a wayward son, and will leave nothing undone that he can do to bring his son back to him. He will alter all his former plans to bring about that result. He will change man's nature, and give him a new heart, if nothing short of that will suffice; or he will change his own procedure entirely, and deal with man not by way of commandments, but by way of inspiration, placing his law in man's inward part, writing it in his heart, so that the great union of God and man may be attained, which he desires.

Individualism of the Prophetic Teaching.—Here we must pause to notice another great advance which the prophets have been led to make in religious knowledge. Their view of Jehovah as a purely moral being, and of man's relation to him as a moral relation, like that between two human beings who have to live together, such as a husband and wife or a father and son, makes religion less a matter for the people as a body, more a matter for the individual. When religion is carried on by public sacrifices and stately festivals and ceremonies, then it is the people as a whole that transacts with God, and the individual need feel no great weight of responsibility in the matter. But if God asks for love, if he says he does not care for sacrifice, but insists on love and devotion, and rather than not have it will work a miracle on man's nature, then the individual is addressed. Every one who has any love to offer feels himself appealed to. Only in his own heart can any one know whether or not God's desire is met; every one, therefore, who understands the appeal becomes personally responsible for the answer, and religion becomes a matter, not only between God and the people, but between God and the individual as well. Personal religion, therefore, makes its appearance among the Jews at this time. Jeremiah carries on dialogues with God; prayer is met with, as the outpouring, not of public needs alone, but of private feeling; the soul has learned that it is called to a life of its own with God, and not merely to a share in the life of the nation with him.

We have dwelt at some length on the ideas of the prophets; not at such length, indeed, as to satisfy any of those who love their writings, for we have thrown together in one view what belongs historically to different centuries, while to the personalities of the prophets, to their sublime certainty and their stupendous courage, we have given no attention. We have stated the outlines also of the great movement of thought in which advances of such transcendent importance were made in religion. They are advances which have not been lost, but which we still enjoy. If it is the gift of the Semitic race to bring the thought of God to bear on life with such direct practical force as Aryan religion never by itself exerted, we must look with profound veneration on those Semitic thinkers who applied this great force in the service of a God, who has no other nature and property but that of justice and love. Religion thus became to them and to all they influenced an engine for the direct promotion of justice and love among men; and we do not think the less of the prophets that the harvest of which they sowed the seed could not be reaped in their day.

Prophecy leads to no Immediate Reform.—The message of the prophets seems at first sight to have been delivered long before the world was ready for it. Even the practical measures which can be traced to their influence are far from being in accordance with their ideas. The causes of this we have already to some extent seen. The prophets were not practical reformers. The amendment they called for was one to be realised in individual lives rather than in public policy, and they do not bring forward schemes of reform which they urge the people as a whole to adopt; they rather fling great ideas upon the mind of their nation, and leave it to others to find out how practical effect may be given to their teaching. To the very end of the Jewish state the prophets and their sympathisers appear to be in a small minority of their nation. The people as a whole is unconverted, the worship of idols goes on, and so does the worship of other gods, even in the temple at Jerusalem. It has seemed to some great scholars that Israel, as a whole, was a heathen people up to the time of the exile, and still needed to be converted to the religion of Jehovah. Kuenen shows[1] in a convincing way that this is an exaggeration, and that people and prophets alike held the religion of Jehovah to be the true religion of Israel; but up to the exile that religion was not reformed in the way the prophets desired.

[Footnote 1: Hibbert Lectures, ii.]

The Reforms.—Yet the word of Jehovah had not returned to him void even during this period. A considerable series of reforms are narrated in the histories, and attested by successive codes of law now embodied in the Pentateuch. These show that the prophetic ideas had gained for themselves a strong party among the people, and that in several reigns the court was under their influence. These reforms show progress in two directions. There is a growing desire to make the worship of Jehovah correspond to the exalted new conceptions of his character as a being of incomparable majesty and holiness; and there is, on the other hand, a rapid growth of moral sentiment; justice and kindness to others are placed more and more in the forefront of the divine requirements. We can do little more than name the passages where the details of these matters may be found. The reforms of Hezekiah (1 Kings xviii.) did not last long. He destroyed a celebrated image of Jehovah, a fate which other images may have shared, and he remodelled the worship of the holy places throughout Judah, so as to remove its more heathenish features, and concentrate it on Jehovah alone. Manasseh, Hezekiah's successor, pursued the opposite policy. In his reign a large collection of strange cults, some of them perhaps those of the individual tribes, were brought back into use; even the barbarous rite of human sacrifice was established at Jerusalem, and the worship of Jehovah became more intense and darker. The shadow of the Assyrian is upon Israel, and as generally happens in times of public anxiety, rites long disused are imagined to have a specially national character and a peculiar potency, and are fetched back from oblivion. The reform of Josiah (2 Kings xxii., xxiii.) was more thorough-going than that of Hezekiah. He made an end of all the unseemly worships his predecessor had encouraged at Jerusalem, so that nothing but the direct worship of Jehovah was left. The strongest step he took, however, was that he attempted to put an end altogether to the shrines at which local worship had hitherto been conducted, thus making a clean sweep of the idolatry of the rural districts. All this was done, we are told, in accordance with a law-book which had been found in the temple by certain high officials, and which, after duly consulting a prophetess about the matter, Josiah brought into operation, and solemnly pledged himself and his people to observe. We are in no doubt as to the nature of this book. The book of Deuteronomy prescribes just such reforms as Josiah carried out, and is generally allowed to have been the written law which was promulgated on this occasion. Now Deuteronomy, while incorporating no doubt many old laws, is in spirit and effect a work of the prophetic school. Its moral teaching and its exhortations to love Jehovah, and to be true to him alone, are quite in the manner of Jeremiah, who was living in the reign of Josiah. And the principal reform of Josiah, namely, the suppression of the local worships, and the concentration of all worship at the temple of Jerusalem alone, stands in the forefront of the special laws in Deuteronomy. Those who aimed at the reform of religion, according to the ideas of the prophets, had thought this out. The worship of the one supreme God should take place, they had concluded, at one place only, and should be national in its character; the whole people should worship the one God at its capital. Provision was made that this should not imply the deprivation of the dwellers in country districts of the use of flesh meat. Formerly, every act of slaughter was a sacrifice, and it was only in connection with a sacrifice that this food could be enjoyed. But in future, animals may be slaughtered at a distance from Jerusalem for food only, apart from any connection with sacrifice. The promulgation of Deuteronomy is an important epoch in the religion of Israel. That work is the first sacred book of Israel; from this time forward Israel knows the will of Jehovah, not only from the prophet's living voice, but from a book which is regarded as having divine authority. This principle once introduced could not fail to develop; to Deuteronomy other books were afterwards added as part of the same law, though in reality they superseded it, and it thus proved the nucleus of the whole Jewish canon.

Earlier Codes.—Deuteronomy was not the earliest law drawn up under prophetic influence. Leviticus xvii.-xxvi. is recognised as being a code by itself, and is an earlier attempt in the same direction as Deuteronomy. The decalogue contained in Deuteronomy v., identical in the main with that of Exodus xx., is of earlier origin than Deuteronomy itself, but is also a prophetical work. It deals with ritual only to the extent of removing certain obstacles to a right worship of God, and places the chief weight of his requirements in the fulfilment of the natural duties. An earlier decalogue which deals principally with ritual, and which contains an early prophetic attempt to free the worship of Jehovah from heathen abuses, is found in Exodus xxxiv. 10-26. The oldest legislation of all is the code found in Exodus xx. 22 to xxiii. 33, which goes by the name of the Book of the Covenant. It is true that in form and in many of its precepts it is identical with the Code of Hammurabi (2250 B.C.), and so bears strong testimony to Babylonian influence. It is, however, much more humane than that old code, and in many particulars is independent of it. As it appears in Exodus it belongs to the times of the early canonical prophets, and as it scarcely deals with ritual at all, it shows the just and humane spirit cultivated by the religion of Jehovah in an agricultural community.

The Exile.—The reformation of Josiah was quickly undone by his successor on the throne, and there was no further opportunity for a reform while the people remained in Palestine. But the exile did not cause the friends of reform to abandon their ideas. The prophets had foretold the exile, and had maintained that the religion of Israel would not be destroyed but rather would be saved by it, and the event proved that they were right in this point also. The exile cured the people definitely of idolatry, and gave them a strong grasp of the idea that they were a peculiar people, called to a work which no other people could accomplish or indeed understand, namely to hold aloft in the world, and for the benefit of the world, the true religion. This conviction forms the burden of the prophecy of the Unknown prophet of the exile (Isaiah xl.-lxvi.). He exalts still more highly than his predecessors the name and power of Jehovah. He is the Creator of the ends of the earth, to whom the nations, including even that great Babylon, are as a drop of the bucket, to be flung whither one will; it is he who has chosen Israel for his people and who now comforts Israel for the sorrows of the exile. In the great drama he is unfolding in the earth Israel has a principal part to play. Israel is called to make known to the nations who do not know him, the true God. It had been prophesied before that the heathen nations would come to Mount Zion to ask counsel of the God of Judah, and that Jehovah should become law-giver and judge over them. The Unknown enlarges on this theme with splendid imagery, and strives to persuade the people to make this cause their own, and to rise to the responsibility it involves. Israel is to be a prince, a leader and commander, of the peoples. The Gentiles are to come from far bringing their treasures and doing homage to the people of the true faith. If Israel as a whole is not fit as yet to discharge this duty for the world, yet there is an inner Israel, a faithful elect of the people who sympathise entirely with Jehovah's purposes and are entirely devoted to his will. This "Servant of Jehovah," at least, has risen to the height of his calling; Jehovah's spirit is in him. He will not fail nor be discouraged till the true religion is established in the earth. At another part of the prophecy the fate of the Servant is seen in darker colours. He is subject to ill-treatment and misrepresentation of all sorts; even when he is suffering for the sake of others he is derided and despised; nay, more,—he is called to suffer martyrdom, and die for sins not his own. But even so, the Servant will conquer in the end. He will know that his sufferings have not been in vain; he will be the means of leading many to righteousness and will be the instrument of Jehovah to bring in the true religion.

The Return. The Reform of Ezra.—Such utterances could not fail of effect on the nation to whom they were addressed, and when the Jews came back to Palestine they were undoubtedly inspired with a new sense of their peculiar national mission. They at once proceeded to show that they were to be a people apart from others, by separating themselves rigorously and even cruelly from entanglements with the surrounding population. They also at once set up the worship of Jehovah as the sole God who had his one shrine at Jerusalem. Their early experiences in Palestine were not encouraging. For a century they remained a struggling and poor community, and it might seem doubtful if they would prove strong enough to maintain their separate position, and to hold up their special testimony to the world. But at that time the Jews who had remained in Babylon came to their aid. These men had never ceased to labour along with their brethren in Palestine for the advancement of their nation; and in particular they had laboured earnestly at the problem of worship, and the result of their labours was a religious constitution so rigid in its ideas, so logically worked out in detail, and so skilfully incorporating and appropriating to itself all the past traditions and usages of the race, that it might almost be said to be strong enough to stand by itself, and would certainly afford to the people, if they adopted it, the support and the discipline they needed. This constitution was introduced by Ezra, the priest and scribe, in the year 444 B.C.,[2] when he read in the ears of the people at Jerusalem (Nehemiah viii., ix.) the new law he had brought with him from Babylon fourteen years before, and had waited all that time to promulgate. The new law of this period was what is called the Priestly Code; it occupies the latter part of Exodus and a large part of Leviticus and Numbers; and the older writings are skilfully interwoven with it, but in general it may easily be distinguished by its tone from the work of earlier periods. Deuteronomy, the earliest law-book, is simply tacked on to it as if it were a part of the same code, though in reality it is often inconsistent with the latter law. The result is the Torah or law, or, as we call it, the Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses (Moses being regarded by a convenient fiction as the source of all Jewish laws). This was thenceforward the law of the Jews.

[Footnote 2: This date and many features of the story of Ezra and the return have of late been much questioned. See "Ezra" in Encyclopaedia Biblica. The account given above follows Wellhausen.]

The Jewish religion, of which this is the code, is generally distinguished from the religion of Israel which prevailed down to the exile; and several important new principles undoubtedly make their appearance at this point. This chapter may fittingly conclude with an enumeration first of the features of Jewish religious life connected with the law or the priestly system, and then of those features of it which lie outside that system.

1. The priestly religion is founded on a sentiment which forms but little part of the faith of early peoples, namely the sense of sin. The prophetic denunciations of Israel's backslidings have at last found entrance, and the people is found submitting to a system which implies that the whole of its past history was sinful and mistaken, and that there is a constant need for supplicating forgiveness. Every prayer begins with a long confession of national sin, in which the present generation also shares. "We have sinned with our fathers," they say. This view is spread over the historical books in the sweeping judgments passed on individual monarchs, on periods of the national life, and especially on the whole of the Northern Kingdom (cf. Nehemiah ix.). The old confidence in the presence of Jehovah with his people has now departed. The earlier Israelites never doubted that Jehovah was in the midst of them; that could be taken for granted except when events proved the contrary. But now Jehovah has grown greater and more awful, while the people have become painfully aware of their deficiencies and cannot assume that he is with them, but must take steps to secure his presence. This is no doubt connected with the growing sense of an individual position and responsibility in religion. To the nation or the tribe it is natural to feel that its cause is just and that its God is with it; but the individual, thrown upon his own inner world for his alliances, is less apt to feel that confidence. Now the religion preached by the prophets is essentially one for the individual. Ezekiel especially felt himself responsible for the fate of individuals, and laboured to awaken his fellow-countrymen one by one to a sense of their danger and responsibility; he taught that each man had to see to his own salvation, that each man would receive the fruit of his own acts. All this tends to a deeper feeling and a more anxious mood in religion, and helps to explain how the sense of sin, on which religious progress at its higher stages depends so much, was fixed so strongly in the Jewish mind. That the Jews underwent a radical change in their disposition is proved by the fact that they submitted to the yoke of the law: for it may be questioned if any people ever sacrificed their natural liberty for the sake of their religion to such an extent as this people did.

2. The divine will is now received by the people in the shape of a sacred book. They cease to look for the living voice of prophecy, and come to think that God has given them in the Torah a perfect and complete revelation. The book takes the place of the prophet, and in time also to some extent of conscience. A man ceases to think for himself what is right and good, and only asks, What does the law say? It is true that a great part of the book is taken up with ritual, with which the ordinary individual has not much to do, but he also believes that the whole of his own duty is to be found there in it, as is no doubt the case. We see from the 119th Psalm how beautiful a form religion may assume even under these terms, when the book in question is felt to be a spiritual treasure, and to speak the words of a living God; but the system of a book-religion has in it the germs of very different fruits. The sacred book is believed to be an exhaustive directory of conduct; but to make it apply to the various cases that arise in practical life it has to be interpreted, and deductions have to be drawn from it. It thus comes to give many a direction which does not appear on the surface. The secondary law, or "tradition," is thus founded, a system which calls for the services of a special class of students. The scribes, who interpret the law and apply it to life, obtain great influence and become the virtual rulers of the nation. While no doubt guided in the main by the noble spirit of their religion, they are led by their system into many absurdities, and their casuistry even becomes at times immoral. They afford the classical example of the results which flow from the doctrine of verbal inspiration, thoroughly worked out; and the life of the Jews under them becomes highly unnatural and artificial, and tends to occupy itself with the husk instead of the kernel of religion.

3. The principal part of the divine will, as expressed in the law, is that connected with sacrifice. Sacrifice occupies the central place in the book, and in the history it records. In this book the temple service, thinly disguised as the service of the tabernacle in the wilderness, is set forth as the great end and aim for which God created the world, settled the nations in it, and called Israel to be a people. The ritual which was observed from the exile to the destruction of Jerusalem may be studied in Exodus and Leviticus. We read of orders and companies of priests who offer daily and other sacrifices according to a rule in which the smallest details are carefully arranged, sacrifices in which little of the old cheerful common meal now lingers, but which are mostly of a purificatory or piacular character. The ritual of sacrifice would not appear to an outward observer to differ very much from that in use among the Greeks or Romans; the Jews certainly conducted it on a larger scale. What end precisely was aimed at in it, the Jew would have found it perhaps hard to say. It was done, he would say, because the law so ordered it, and the law must be obeyed even if one did not quite understand what was enjoined. The daily sacrifice removed the impurity of the temple staff, and enabled the people to be sure that the favour of the deity continued with them. Many sacrifices aimed at the removal of particular sins; thankfulness also was expressed in them, and other feelings may also have ascended with the smoke from the altar. To Jews living at a distance the sacrifice, which could be offered nowhere but at Jerusalem, was the chief symbol, the great mystery, of their faith.

4. The notion of holiness is closely connected with worship. Things and persons are holy which belong to Jehovah, and are withdrawn from common use. These it is dangerous to touch unwarily. Jehovah is an unapproachable being; the high priest may come into the innermost part of the temple, but only once a year, and no one else may come there; the priests may enter the Holy Place, but not the people. To speak lightly of the temple was a crime the Jews could not forgive. The Sabbath was the Lord's day; man must not attend on it to his own worldly concerns. The deity is surrounded with dread to an unparalleled extent; all that belongs to him is to be regarded with awe. Connected with the notion of holiness is that of purity. In the later Persian religion the distinction has always to be anxiously remembered by the believer between what belongs to the good spirit and what has fallen under the power of the evil spirit. The Jew, also, who is called to be holy and separate from other men, lives in constant dread lest he should touch something unclean, and so forfeit his own purity. There are clean animals, and unclean ones which he must not eat; various washings of the hands and of domestic utensils are needed in order to keep up the state of purity; many trades involve contact with substances which make purity almost impossible. Above all, it is defiling to eat what a heathen has cooked, or to sit at the same table with heathens. Thus the Jew was confirmed in the belief of his own superiority to men of other races; and was prevented by many barriers from mingling with them, or even regarding them as brethren. His circumcision, his Sabbath, his laws of purity, his peculiarities of diet, the absolute impossibility of his eating along with Gentiles, kept him separate, and helped to nourish in him the spirit of haughtiness and exclusiveness. The accepted worshipper of Jehovah is, with the early prophets, the man who is morally sound, who has curbed his passions and his selfish impulses; with the later Jew that may still be the case, but there are also a number of indispensable preliminaries of which the prophets certainly did not dream. The man who would go up to the hill of Jehovah must be one who has not eaten shell-fish or pork, nor opened his shop on the Sabbath, nor touched a dead body, nor used a spoon handed to him by a Gentile without washing it. How all this unfitted the Jewish people to be a missionary of the pure religion, and how adverse the whole Levitical system was to the earnest apprehension of that religion no less than to its diffusion, the New Testament amply shows. But it kept the people separate from the world and constant to their faith amid even the greatest temptations and the severest persecutions, and so enabled them to preserve the precious treasure committed to them till the time should come when the world was to receive it from their hands.

Heathenish Elements of Judaism.—In the system we have sketched, in which the prophetic teaching was hardened into a ritual and a law, there are various elements which do not belong to an advanced stage of religious progress. While the sacrificial ritual, not outwardly exalted above heathenism, is to some extent redeemed by the motives which enter into it, the great system of clean and unclean rests on no rational basis, and resembles the set of taboos, which no one can explain, of a savage tribe; and the reduction of daily life under a set of minute and troublesome rules, shows the devotion more than the enlightenment of those who submitted to it. There was a necessity that the vessel should be so narrow and so hard which was to keep the wine of Jewish religion from being mixed with other liquids, but the vessel itself belongs to the rude and early world. In the Jewish religion of this time there are far different elements, which point forward and not backward, and in which the future course of religious progress is clearly anticipated. If his temple ritual was crude, and if his law pursued him into every one of his actions, the thoughts of the Jew were free; the truths which were unfolding their riches in his mind were sufficient compensation for much outward restraint, and the fair world of imagination was open to him in which the past clothed itself with legend and the future with splendid hopes.

Spiritual Elements.—The period after the exile is that of the composition of the Psalms. Many of these poems may have been written earlier; many were undoubtedly written at this time, and the belief gains ground that the Psalmist came after the prophet, and adopted for popular use the prophet's ideas. In the Psalter we hear the thrill of joy and triumph as the great truths of theism come to be grasped as certainties. The congregation now utters in song what, when the prophet first announced it, so few had courage to believe, that Jehovah is king, that he rules over the nations, that he is far above all the gods, nay, that there is no other God than he. The joy of having embraced this thought, of having escaped from all confusion with regard to the powers that rule the world, and of seeing all things in this splendid light, finds manifold expression. The believers delight themselves anew in the worship of Jehovah, and see fresh beauties in his courts, and in the service of him there; they delight in his word in connection with every part of their experience. They understand the world as they never did before, since it is his work, and praise the Creator as they follow the whole process of creation. New lights open to them on the history of their race, new solutions occur to them of the moral difficulties they have felt, as they saw the wicked prosper and the good cast down. There is very little about ritual in the Psalms; it is regarded chiefly as an offering of thanks and praise to Jehovah for his wonderful works, and for his mercies; and it is viewed ideally as an act of homage in which not only the immediate worshippers, but all nations on the earth may be conceived as taking part. On the other hand, the observance of Jehovah's moral requirements, and implicit trust in him while one seeks to do his will, is insisted on again and again, as the true method to please him, and to obtain his protection against all dangers. There are few moods of the religious life that are not represented in the Psalms: penitence, intellectual perplexity, domestic sorrow, feebleness, loneliness, the approach of death, the excitement of great events, the agony of persecution, quiet contemplation of nature, each has its word. The imprecations of some of the Psalms show a trait of the national character without which the picture would be incomplete. It may be in part extenuated by the consideration that in these Psalms it is the community that speaks, and that the enemy of the good cause deserves less forbearance than the private adversary. Whether the Psalms in general are to be conceived as uttered by the community rather than as private outpourings, is a question not yet decided. In either sense the Psalms have been used and are still used as the hymn-book of Christendom, as well as of the Jews; and it will always be a wonderful feature in the religion of Israel, that so soon after the truth of the one God was discovered by the prophets, it received a form of expression which has proved fitted for the use of every nation in the world.

The Jews after the exile are in possession of a new form of religious association which belongs to a high stage of growth. The temple worship is one in which the ordinary layman has no part, or only an occasional part to play. The priest does everything in it; even the singing of Psalms is done by choirs of priests. And the dweller in the country might rarely be a witness of these great solemnities. But we know that in the Maccabean period the country was covered with synagogues: with buildings, that is to say, where the surrounding population met on the Sabbath, and perhaps on other days as well, to join in common prayer, and to hear lessons of Scripture and exhortations. Some local religious meeting was necessary; an earnest people could not do without it, and the local sacrifices were now of the past. But the synagogue service marks a great advance in the religious position of the Jews. They can now meet without any act or sacrament which they have to do in common, to engage in purely intellectual religious exercises. The same advance, as we shall see, took place in Greece about the same time; what moral or religious furtherance they wanted, the earnest there began to seek from the lectures of philosophers. The synagogue, however, was a territorial institution; all the Jews in the neighbourhood came to its services. It kept them acquainted with the law which otherwise they might have forgotten, and also with the writings of the prophets, which were regularly read, and thus strengthened the bonds which held all Jews together, in the past history and in the growing hopes of their race.

The National Hopes.—Judaism becomes more and more, as befits a faith of which prophets are the principal exponents, a religion of hope. Debarred by their subjection under successive heathen powers from political activity, and keenly aware of their outward humiliation, the Jews turn to an ideal world in which they are free. The prophets had spoken of a judgment in which Jehovah would judge the whole world, of a happy time when Israel would be at peace from all his enemies, and God and people would dwell together in full communion; and when the land of Israel would become the religious capital of the world. They had added to their picture features even more ideal, and had declared that the conflicts of external nature would cease, the wild animals would grow tame and friendly, all physical as well as all moral evil would disappear. It was in this world, not in a remote region or in the land beyond death, that all this was to be realised. Jerusalem is the centre of the picture and the Jewish nation stands in the foreground of it as the chosen people of the God of all the world. Now these predictions, which with the prophets are vague and idealised, were taken by the Jews always more seriously and worked out in detail. After the prophet comes the apocalyptic writer, such as Daniel (the Apocalypse of the New Testament belongs to the same class of literature), who is able to give the exact course of the history which is to lead up to the final judgment, to fix its precise date, and to give many details of the ultimate state of affairs. These "revelations," which were written generally to comfort the Jews in their trials and to encourage them to steadfastness in persecution, were very popular. It is true that they nourished the national pride, and enabled the Jew to feel himself superior to a world in which he occupied outwardly no great position; but on the other hand the hopes they fed were not necessarily unspiritual; at the Christian era we find it to be a mark of the most genuine piety that one should be "waiting for the redemption of Israel." At this period the national hope was occupied with the figure of a Messiah, a God-sent Deliverer, whose coming was to be the prelude to the establishment of the divine kingdom. We learn from the Gospels what various ideas were entertained by the Jews of the first century about this "coming one," and how little Jesus Christ was felt to answer to the common expectation.

A few words must be said of Jewish beliefs concerning the other world. While there are traces of an old ancestor-worship in the earlier parts of Jewish history, no belief of the kind had much importance in Israel. The Jews shared the general belief of the early world that the dead continued in a shadowy existence without any power for action. They have an under-world, Sheol, where the dead are; Isaiah has a magnificent description of the dead kings sitting on thrones together in Sheol and rising up to greet a newcomer who was a great potentate on earth, with the words "Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?" The dead are conceived as continuing in a weak and unsubstantial reflection of their former selves. They can be fetched up to the earth by magic arts to tell the future, but this was strictly forbidden at a very early time. The Psalms and other later books contain many plain denials that man has any continuance to look for after death. The religion of the Old Testament, as has often been said, is for this life. God's rewards are to be looked for before death; once gone to the grave one can no more enjoy God's bounty or give him thanks. God's kingdom of the future is also a kingdom of this world; Jerusalem is its capital, and nature is to be transformed for it. In the later period of Jewish history, however, the hope of the future which has been so entirely abandoned, which Job, for example, in an early chapter puts so peremptorily away from him, creates itself afresh in a new form. In the time of Christ the Jews believe, as a matter of course, that men will rise again. It has been contended that the Jews derived their later doctrine of a future life from their contact with Persia, but it is not necessary to account for it in this way. It arose naturally among the Jews in more ways than one. The individual believer like Job, entirely sure of his own innocence, and feeling that he was doomed to die of his disease without any vindication in this life, claimed that an opportunity should be found beyond the grave to pronounce the sentence which a just God could not omit to give. In Daniel xii. it is foretold that men of conspicuous virtue and men of conspicuous wickedness will have a resurrection—the former to share the glories of the kingdom from which as teachers and martyrs they could not be wanting, the latter to receive their punishment. And as prophets who have been long dead are expected to return to the earth, the gate of death is not so firmly closed as formerly and the belief in a future life easily became current.

Thus Judaism comes to be a religion full of contradictions, and could not as a whole pass to other nations. The temple and the synagogue represent opposite principles of worship. The Jew feels himself to be entrusted with a world-religion, and yet shuts himself up in such exclusiveness as to draw upon himself the hatred of all peoples, and to be charged in turn with hatred of the human race. A religion of faith and love consorts with a religion of rules and limitations. If the faith of Israel was to fulfil its mission to the world it was necessary that some one should come who could purge this threshing-floor, burning the chaff and gathering up the wheat to be the seed of the progress of mankind.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

The Books of the Old Testament, including the Apocrypha, in the Revised Version.

The Histories of Israel; Ewald, Kuenen, Wellhausen, Stade.

Robertson Smith's The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, and articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Smend's Alttestamentliche Religionsgeschichte.

Stade, Biblische Theologie des Alten Testaments, 1905.

For a criticism of the critical historians the reader may consult The Early Religion of Israel, by Prof. James Robertson.

Prof. Valeton, Die Israeliten, in De la Saussaye.

Schuerer, History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ, 1885-90.

Kantzsch, "Religion of Israel," in Dictionary of the Bible, vol. v.

E. J. Foakes-Jackson, The Biblical History of the Hebrews, Second Edition.



CHAPTER XIII ISLAM

In chronological order Islam stands last of all the great religions; it appeared six centuries after Christianity, and Christian ideas enter into it. It is, however, so essentially Semitic that it can only be understood aright if studied in connection with the group now occupying our attention. In Islam Semitic religion opens its arms to embrace mankind, and accomplishes, in a fashion, the destiny to which Judaism was invited, but which Judaism failed to realise till it was transformed in Christianity. In Islam Semitic religion is not transformed, but enters in its own stern and uncompromising character into the position of a universal faith.

This religion sprang up and entered on its career of conquest with startling suddenness and even, some scholars hold, without any natural preparation for its coming in the country of its birth. The Arabs called the period before Islam the "time of ignorance"; in that period they considered their race had no history; the new religion, when it arose, had made a clean sweep of all that had gone before, and had caused a new world to begin. The labours of Arabic scholars have, however, done something to dispel the mists which hung over early Arabia, and it is possible both to give a much more satisfactory sketch than formerly of the earlier religion of the Arabs, and to discern to some extent the processes which had unconsciously been preparing for the advent of a higher and stronger faith.

Arabia before Mahomet.—The Arabs of the central peninsula in the times before Mahomet were not a nation but a set of tribes—mostly nomadic, but some of them settled in cities, who, while united by language, custom, and traditions, had no central government or organisation. The desert which they inhabited, as it admitted no cultivation, kept human life uniform and unprogressive; external influences penetrated slowly into this corner of the world, and society was still arranged as it had been for thousands of years. The strongest tie was that of blood. A man's fellow-tribesmen were bound to avenge his murder; and so one slaughter led to another, and from generation to generation the land was filled with a perpetual series of blood-feuds. Twice a year, however, a cessation of these feuds took place; a month came round in which there was a universal truce. Men who were enemies then made the same pilgrimage to a distant shrine; at such a time trade caravans could set out and travel in safety; and the great markets or festivals then took place, which, while based at first on religious ideas, had in most part ceased to have any religious character. Some of these markets were, at the time of Mahomet, national occasions: men of every tribe met and came to know each other there; the poetry which had been composed during the preceding months was publicly recited, so that the rise of a new poet was known to all Arabia; the news of all the tribes circulated, and foreign ideas and doctrines were also to be heard. In proportion as the face of nature was hard and forbidding, social life was bright and gay; wine, women, wit, and war provided the themes of poets and the ordinary aims of life.

The Old Religion.—It has generally been said that the Arabs before Islam were irreligious. They themselves contrasted the sternness of the new period with the gaiety of the old one. The truth is, as Wellhausen has admirably shown,[1] that the working religion of the country had become before the period of Islam entirely effete. Arab religion was based on the ideas and usages which have been described in chap. x. of this book; it is mainly from Arabia, indeed, that the original character of Semitic religion is known to us. Each tribe had its god, whom it regarded as a magnified master or ruler, and with whom it held communion by sacrifice, the blood being brought in contact with the god and the victim devoured by the tribesmen. The god is represented sometimes by a tree, generally by a stone; a piece of fertile land belongs to him, within which the plants and animals are sacred; the religious meeting can be held in no other spot. Hence the Arabs are said to be stone worshippers; but the phrase is an awkward one: what they worshipped was not the stone but a god connected with it. And the early gods of Arabia are a motley company; it is only in their relations to their worshippers and in the order of the worship paid them that they have some uniformity. The greatest and oldest deity of the Arabs is Allat or Alilat, "the Lady." Like the female deity found in all primitive Semitic religions, she is a stately and commanding lady. She is not the wife of a god, nor are unseemly ideas connected with her. She belongs to the early world in which motherhood was synonymous with rule, since the family had no male head; she has a character but no history: mythology has not gathered round her. Arabia has also certain nature-gods. The stellar deities are mostly female; there is a male sun-god Dusares. Heaven is worshipped by some, not the blue but the rainy heaven, which is a source of blessings. There are no gods belonging to the region under the earth. The serpent is the only animal that receives worship.

[Footnote 1: Reste Arabischen Heidenthums, p. 188.]

But the gods of Arabia belong mostly to another class than that of nature-gods; or at least if they ever were connected with nature, they have parted with such associations. They are uncouth figures, with vague legends and miscellaneous attributes. One set of them is said to have been worshipped by the contemporaries of Noah; they are big men, and it is their property to drink milk. Hubal was the chief god of Mecca. It was his property to bring rain. Vadd was a great man, with two garments, and a sword and spear, bow and quiver. Jaghuth, "the Helper," was a portable god, not a stone probably, since he was carried into battle by his tribe, as the ark was by the Israelites. Another god is called "the Burner," no doubt from the sacrifices offered to him. Each tribe has its god or set of gods, and certain sacred objects connected with its gods. One god is found by those who kiss or rub a certain black stone, another in connection with a white stone, another with a tree. And of many of them there are images; the stone has some work done on it, or there is a wooden block roughly hewn. The "Caaba" is originally a black stone which is kissed or rubbed at Mecca. The name was given, however, to the cube-shaped building, in one of the walls of which the black stone had been fixed. In this building there stood in old days images of Abraham and Ishmael, each with divining arrows in his hand. Of such idols a large number existed in Mahomet's time, and were destroyed by him. In some cases the image had a house, and a person was needed to guard it; this functionary also kept some simple apparatus for casting lots or otherwise obtaining counsel from the deity, and oaths and vows were made before him, to which the deity became a witness.

To these beliefs of early Arabia must be added a lively belief in jinns, spirits who are not gods, since the gods are above the earth, but the jinn is compelled to haunt some part of the earth's surface. The jinns can assume any form they choose, and are often met with in the shape of serpents. Wellhausen surmises that the seraphs of the Jews are to be traced to some such origin. They infest desert places, and are nocturnal in their habits. What they do is often not observed till afterwards. They spy upon the gods, and may bring information from above to men whom they haunt or with whom they are in league. Of the magic of Arabia, the signs and omens drawn from birds, from dreams, and other occurrences, it is not necessary to speak; and we need only say, in concluding this rough sketch of the ideas of the early Arabs, that the belief in a life beyond was very faint; they set out food for the dead, whom they professed to think of as still existing, but the belief, if they entertained it, was perfunctory and had no influence.

Confusion of Worship.—At the period of Islam the worship of Arabia had fallen into great confusion. The gods were stationary, but the tribes wandered; and the consequence was that the wandering tribe left its shrine behind it to be cared for by its successors in that piece of country, and itself also, when it gained a new seat, succeeded to the guardianship of a new god. Thus, on the one hand, the worship of each shrine was constantly gathering new associations, as each tribe which had been there left behind it some new legend or practice; and on the other hand, pilgrimage became universal, since each tribe had to pay periodical visits to its gods whom it had left behind. At Mecca we read of hundreds of idols; a hundred tribes have left there something of their own. Thus Mecca became a sacred place for tribes far and near, and rose into national importance; and the same was the case to a less degree in other places also. But as this process went on, it inevitably led to the weakening of religion. The tie of blood, which was felt always, was a far stronger thing than the tie of a common worship for which the tribe had to go to another part of the country, and to come in contact with a multitude of other cults. Worship therefore became more and more a superstition: a thing, that is to say, whose real sacredness was in the past, and which was only kept up from pious habit; it did not supply the inspiration of ordinary life nor guide the more active minds among the people.

We have not yet spoken of Allah, who is understood to be the god par excellence of Arabia. But for this there is a good reason. Allah is not, like the other beings we have spoken of, a historical god, with a legend, a shrine, a tribe all to himself. He is not a historical personage, but an idea consolidated, no doubt at an early period, into a god. Wellhausen traces the rise of Allah for us in a most interesting way. The name, he shows, is not a proper name that belonged to one particular figure in the pantheon of Arabia; it is the title which the Arab conferred on his god, whatever the proper name of that being might be. Whatever god he worshipped, he called him Allah, Lord; and thus every Arabic god was Allah, as every head of a household has the name of "father" and every monarch that of "king." And as every tribal god was Allah, the thought arose, no doubt in very early times, of one god who was common to the tribes. Language paved the way for thought; while the tribal gods were still believed in and adored, this figure rose above them—a being who has no special worship of his own, who does not ask for it nor need it, but who yet fills, as none of the lesser beings does, the character of deity. Allah was the god of all the tribes; and as his figure grew in the mind of the country, it was inevitable that the worship of the historical gods should still further lose its importance, till only the women and children really cared for it. A monotheism of a grave and earnest kind thus made its way beside the old belief in many gods. Mahomet found that his fellow-countrymen did not really believe in the minor gods; when they were in danger or in urgent need of any blessing, it was to Allah that they called. The fall of the idols, when it came about, took place very easily; they were no longer needed. The Arabs had come to believe in a god who dwelt in heaven and was the creator of the world, who ordained man's life with an irreversible decree, by whom the bitter and the sweet, both the hitting of the mark and the missing it, were alike fixed. The moral character of Allah was not markedly in advance of that of his people. What a man gains by robbery he calls the gift of Allah, while what is gained by industry is called by another name. Yet Allah is also felt by some to keep them back from robbery; he powerfully upholds the moral standards which have been reached. He is the defender of strangers, the avenger of treason. His moral influence is negative, however, rather than positive. He does not inspire with ideals of goodness; but he holds back from evil. He is not a being who is ever likely to enter, like the God of the Jews, into intimate and affectionate relations with men; he is too abstract and has too little history to be capable of such unbending; his religion, when it comes to be fully formed, will be one of puritans and fanatics rather than of the meek and lowly. He is the one great instance of a god without any natural basis who has come to exercise rule. He is a god of whom reason can thoroughly approve—no absurd legends cling to him; he is from the first great, mighty, and moral; and he rules the world in righteousness by inflexible standards. This religion is coming to the surface even in the "time of ignorance."

Judaism and Christianity in Arabia.—The question has been much discussed whether the new religion of Arabia was due to contact with Judaism or with Christianity. Both of these faiths were known in Arabia before the time of the Prophet. There was a large Jewish population at Medina, and synagogues existed in many other places; and there were Christians in Arabia, though their Christianity was that only of small sects and of lonely ascetics, and had failed to convert the country as a whole. To the Arabs the Jews were "the people of the Book," the book in the traditions of which they also had some share. Ignorant themselves for the most part of the arts of reading and writing, and divided among a multitude of petty worships which they were ceasing to respect, they looked up with envy to those whose faith had been fixed for so many ages in a literary standard. But while the Jews were respected in Arabia, they were far from popular. The qualities which have drawn down on them the bitter hatred of modern peoples among whom they dwell, acted there in the same way; their pride and exclusiveness, their keenness in business, their profession as money-lenders, made them detested in Arabia as in modern Germany. On the other hand, the ascetic view of life which the Christians represented had attractions even for some of the higher minds among the Arabs. A set of men called "Hanyfs" were well known in Mahomet's time, who were seeking for a better religion than the Arab worships afforded, and a better life than that of eternal feud. The meaning of the name is controverted; those to whom it was applied had not attached themselves to Judaism nor to Christianity; they were people in earnest about religion who had not reached any definite position. Even where, as with Mahomet himself, the facts of Judaism and of Christianity were most inaccurately known, the view of God held in these religions and the moral standard they set up could not fail to exercise much influence. If in Arab thought itself a god like Allah was rising to definite personal character and to a position of great superiority over the old gods, then the inner movement was in the same direction as the influence of older religions from without, and the time was ripe for a new faith. It was not to be expected that a people like the Arabs should accept a religion which had its origin in another country, or which threatened like Christianity to bring to an end the old tribal system; a new growth from within was needed, and this was ready to appear.

The beginnings of most religions are wrapt in obscurity; but the rise of Islam is known to us with perfect certainty and in considerable detail. The only difficulties in the way of understanding it are of a psychological nature; we have to account for the foundation of a religion which spread with lightning speed over many lands, and which still continues to spread, by one whose character was in some respects far from noble, and who was capable of stooping to compromise and to the darkest treachery in order to gain his ends. How a religion fitted for many races and many generations of men could be founded by a barbarian and by the aid of barbarous means—that is the problem of this religion. The materials for solving it lie open before us. The Koran is undoubtedly the authentic work of Mahomet himself: the suras or chapters are arranged in a wrong order, and if they are read as they stand do not tell any intelligible story; but when placed, as has now been done by scholars,[2] in the true historical order, they show the history of Mahomet's mind with great clearness. After the Koran came the traditions. From the immense volume of these the industry of the scholars of Islam as well as others has succeeded in sifting out what is most to be relied on. In no other case is the separation of the mythical from the historical element in the early traditions so easily made, and the religion comes into view in the full light of day.

[Footnote 2: S. Lane-Poole, The Speeches of Mohammad, 1882; the most important parts of the Koran chronologically arranged with a very useful introduction.]

Mahomet. Early Life.—Mahomet was born about 570 A.D., of a family belonging to the Mecca branch of the Coreish, a powerful tribe, who carried on a large caravan trade with Syria, and who were the guardians of the sanctuary which was the central point of Arabian religion. He entered therefore from his birth into the centre of the faith of his country. He was early left an orphan, and was brought up by relatives, who were kind to him but who were very poor. He had to make his living at an early age by herding sheep, an occupation which conduced in his case, as it has done in others, to contemplation and thought. In early manhood he entered the service of Khadija, a rich widow; and he made journeys in her affairs to Syria and Palestine, where he may have seen places famous in Jewish history and may also have come in contact with Christianity. At the age of twenty-five he married Khadija, who was fifteen years older than himself; the marriage was a happy one, and there were several children. He is described as a man of middle height, with a fair skin, a pleasant countenance, and pleasing manners; and he had proved his ability in business. Some years after his marriage he began to think deeply about religious subjects. He came into connection apparently with some of those Hanyfs or penitents, mentioned above, who, without being formed into a sect, were at one in seeking for a more satisfactory religious position. The religion to which they were feeling their way was a monotheism, a service of the one God of Abraham, but not that of Judaism with its exaltation of the Jewish race, nor that of Christianity, in which God had a Son for his companion. Submission to the one God was to them the essence of religion. "Islam" means submission, and the "Moslem" is the person who thus submits himself to the one sole God, whether he be Jew or Christian or neither. The Hanyfs also held the belief of the Christians in a coming judgment; and the effect of their beliefs on their lives was that they practised austerities and often retired from the world.

His Religious Impressions.—Mahomet at this part of his life began also to withdraw himself, and to go apart to lonely spots for meditation. What he meditated we see from his sayings and doings afterwards. The contrast between the pure religion of Allah, as held by the Hanyfs, and the popular religion of Mecca with which his birth connected him, with its trade associations, its idols, its unintelligible rites, was certainly a tremendous one; and if a judgment was impending over all but the believers in Allah, it was a terrible prospect. For many years, however, Mahomet was simply a Hanyf. He was one who had surrendered himself, with a tender and impressionable soul, to the divine will and guidance, and was filled with the sense of Allah's presence and power, and of his own accountability to him in the great and tremendous realities of life. In addition to this, however, we have to mention a circumstance which is generally thought to have had a determining influence in Mahomet's production of Islam. He had a peculiar temperament; mental excitement led in him to inner catastrophes which, whether they are classed under epilepsy or hysteria, caused him to see visions and to believe that certain words had been addressed to him by heavenly visitants. The new religious movement in Arabia had secured an adherent in whom its teachings would be felt with tremendous intensity, and would possibly break forth with irresistible force.

The Revelations.—Mahomet was forty years of age when the thoughts which had long been working within him burst into open expression. This took place by means of a vision. An angel appeared to him as he slept on Mount Hira on one of his nightly wanderings, and held a scroll before him which he bade him read. He had not learned to read, but the angel insisted, and so he read; and what he read was the earliest revealed piece of the Koran (sura 96):—

Read,[3] in the name of thy Lord who created, created man from a drop. Read, for thy Lord is the Most High, who hath taught by the pen, hath taught to man what he knew not. Nay, truly man walketh in delusion when he deemeth that he sufficeth for himself; to thy Lord they must all return.

All men, i.e., however they may think, as the Arabs were given to think, that they need no help but that of their own right arm, must come before Allah's judgment and render an account to him: this is the doctrine by which Mahomet first appealed to his fellow-countrymen. It is a revelation. Allah teaches it by sending down a copy of what is written in the Book in heaven, the "mother of the Book" from which all revelations, Jewish, Christian, or Mahomet's own, are alike derived. Mahomet has thus begun to prophesy. The first outburst of revelation threw him into great agitation; he thought he was possessed by a jinn; and it tended to his further distress that an interval of two or three years elapsed before another vision took place. Then the vision came again. "Rise up and warn!" it said to him; "and thy Lord magnify, and thy garments purify, and abomination shun, and grant not favours to gain increase; and wait for thy Lord." The revelations now began to come in rapid succession, and Mahomet now believed in his own inspiration. In this conviction he never wavered afterwards; and there can be no doubt that the earlier revelations were felt by him as if they came from without and were dictated by a power he could not resist. His fellow-countrymen naturally took another view; like other prophets, Mahomet was said to be mad and to be possessed by a spirit; and these accusations stung him, because he himself had at first apprehended something of the kind. The later pieces were of a different character; he had the power afterwards of producing a revelation to suit any situation which arose; but the contents of the earlier ones were not unworthy of being revelations, and such he felt them to be.

[Footnote 3: Or, Preach!—loud reading or repetition being the mode of claiming attention for the divine word.]

His Preaching.—He preached the new truth at first to those with whom he was intimate. It was not new but old; it was the religion of Abraham that he preached, that of the Book of which both Jews and Christians had counterparts; he did not think of founding a new religion. He called his own household and his relatives to submit themselves to Allah, the supreme Lord and the righteous Judge, before whose judgment they must soon stand. They were to put away heathen vices and to practise the duty of regular prayer, of giving alms without hoping for any advantage from it, and of temperance. After a time he is encouraged by new suras to preach publicly, and does so. The Meccans, however, do not listen to him. The prophet's preaching acquires by this opposition a sternness it did not possess at first, and he proceeds to attack the popular worship in a way fitted to stir up against him the bitterest hostility. The Meccans hear from him that the religion to which all Arabia flocks together, and without which they would do little trade, is not only a vanity but a thing abhorrent to Allah, and undoubtedly drawing down damnation on all who partake in it; and that their forefathers are unquestionably in hell. Such preaching could not be tolerated; Mahomet's friends are appealed to to stop his mouth, but in vain, and his fellow-tribesmen, though they do not believe in him, yet protect him, as the laws of kindred require.