“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” writes the
   Deuteronomist; “and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine
   heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might.”

Malachi, looking round upon the manifold forms of worship of the various nations, and discerning that through them all the soul of man was feeling after one and the same Divine Being, makes God say: 

“From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name is great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense is offered unto me and a pure offering; for my name is great among the heathen, saith the Lord of Hosts.”

Micah asks,

   “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy
   and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Of this continuous growth of religion the Old Testament is the record.

5. Israel’s literature records the forcing forward of this growth of religion, as by some Power back of man, shaping its ends, rough-hew them as it might.

The Niebuhr of Hebrew history rightly pointed out this significant fact in the introduction to his great work.

   “The manifold changes and even confusions and perversities, which
   manifest themselves in the long course of the threads of its history,
   ultimately tend to the solution of this great problem.”—­Ewald:  Intro.

A singular succession of great men arise to save and revive and reform religion in every critical epoch.  Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Ezra, Judas Maccabeus come upon the stage, one after the other, perform their several parts with singular aptitude, and prepare the way for the next movement when it comes due.  The history of the people rightly read becomes a mighty drama, in which the right man is never wanting at the right time, and the action moves on steadily toward a climax.

The experiences of the people, even those most perplexing to the faith of the nation at the time, fit singularly into this organic evolution of religion.  The rending of the Kingdom of David, that blighted the fair prospect of a martial empire, turned the nation aside from the false career on which it was entering.  The overthrow of the Northern and then of the Southern Kingdom, and the deportation of the people to Babylonia, seemingly the ruin of the sister countries, threw them in upon their inner life; and in the exile their religion found its highest reach of thought.

Even that hierarchical movement which so quickly followed upon this bloom of prophetism, and which to the superficial look seems only the arrest of life and the beginning of death, reveals a legitimate function in the organic processes of the national religion.  In this priestly organization of institutional religion, all free prophetic inspiration did indeed die out for over four centuries.  But even this was a necessity for the right flowering