This is the secret which has kept the religions inspired by the Bible from lapsing, as other religions have done, into lifelessness.

Egypt was the land of a religion which had won a high conception of the Divine unity; a religion which was scientific in its forms of thought, and earnestly moral in its spirit; but which failed to keep distinct in mind the order of nature from the Being on whom it reposes, and thus sank into the dreamy pantheism of its cultured classes, and the poetic polytheisms of its people.  Of this lapse, Renouf writes: 

All gods were in fact but names of the One who resided in them all.  But this God is no other than Nature.  Both individuals and entire nations may long continue to hold this view, without drawing the inevitable conclusion, that if there is no other God than this, the world is really without a God.  But the fate of a religion which involves such a conclusion, and with that conclusion the loss of faith in immortality, and even in the distinction of Right and Wrong, except so far as they are connected with ritual prescriptions, is inevitably sealed.[62]

Neither Judaism, nor Mohammedanism, nor Christianity, the religions fed directly or indirectly from the Bible, have run, or can well run into this fatal error.  The Divine Being who is mirrored in the Bible is the Conscious Intelligence to whom alone of right belongs that ineffable name—­GOD.  This is the thought and this is the word which hold the spell of the Bible power over the human soul.  Nowhere else is the sense of God so alive, nowhere else does it so thrill the whole being of man.  It was this living God whom these holy men of old were seeking; not simply the august ideals of the soul, but the Eternal Being who casts them as his shadows upon man: 

Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes,
O Thou that dwellest in the heavens.

* * * * *

My soul truly waiteth still upon God,
For of Him cometh my salvation.

* * * * *

Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,
So longeth my soul after Thee, O God. 
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the Living God;
When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?

It is God whom these holy men find.  The Ineffable Presence rejoices their souls, and as we keep company with them rejoices our souls also: 

Lord, Thou hast been our home
From one generation to another.

* * * * *

Whoso dwelleth in the secret-place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

* * * * *

O Lord, Thou hast searched me out and known me. 
Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising;
Thou understandest my thoughts afar off. 
Thou art about my path and about my bed,
And spiest out all my ways. 
For lo, there is not a word in my tongue
But Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.