From a people thus sound at heart, amid the mellowing richness of civilization, we may well expect great things in religion.  Whatever the outward forms of religion, its roots ran deep down into the moral law, and must needs have borne in due time a noble fruitage.  There was in fact a striking development of religion in this period.  It was coincident with the secular development of the nation.  This indeed is the general rule of religious revival.  Religion advances with the advancing life of man, each new and true step forward opening a higher possibility of thought and feeling concerning God.  As Moses the Emancipator was the father of true religion in Israel, so Samuel the king-maker was its early master.  We cannot now trace clearly his work, but we can see that he was a fresh ethical and spiritual force, shaping religious life anew.

Prophets there had doubtless been before him, in Israel as out of it, but they were unethical and unspiritual influences in religion; the frenzied dervishes, the oracular seers, the wizards and necromancers who long afterward claimed this name, and were denounced by the higher prophets.  Samuel’s masterful work was to turn this semi-religious force into a higher channel, and to direct it toward a moral aim.  He was the creator of the type which drew after him “the goodly fellowship of the prophets.”  The traditions of Israel present him in the role of fearless censor and truthful mentor to the infant State; the role which the great prophets later on assumed toward the maturer nation.  He criticized the King, guided the people, and held the nation loyal to Jehovah.  However little perception the mass of the people had of the spiritual significance of the State religion, however many gross forms of popular religion existed around and within the tolerant institutions of Jehovahism, it was a vital matter to preserve that State religion, and keep it well ahead of the people’s growth.  Thus we can perceive the historic significance of the work of the next great prophet after Samuel, Elijah; through the legendary nimbus that gathered round his striking personality and dramatic action In a critical hour, when the Jehovah-worship had well nigh disappeared, he stood alone against the powers of the realm, and rallied the people once more beneath the name of the god of their father.  He plucked a victory from defeat which decided the course of history.  What if Jehovah was but a name to the mass of the people?  What if they continued to worship much as before, only no longer at the altars of Baal?  There are long periods in the history of man when the future depends upon allegiance to an institution little understood by those who shout most lustily for it.  The future may lie seeded down in a name which stores within it the forces of a new and higher unfolding when the times come ripe.  Thus it proved through the crawling centuries in which Israel held hard by a name of God which then meant little to it, but which ultimately evolved its ethical