It is probably impossible for us to trace with accuracy the rise of the religion of Jehovah.  ‘The wise and learned’ dispute endlessly over dates of documents, over the amount of later doctrine interpolated into the earlier texts, over the nature, source, and quantity of foreign influence—­Chaldaean, Accadian, Egyptian, or Assyrian.  We know that Israel had, in an early age, the conception of the moral Eternal; we know that, at an early age, that conception was contaminated and anthropomorphised; and we know that it was rescued, in a great degree, from this corruption, while always retaining its original ethical aspect and sanction.  Why matters went thus in Israel and not elsewhere we know not, except that such was the will of God in the mysterious education of the world.  How mysterious that education has been is best known to all who have studied the political and social results of Totemism.  On the face of it a perfectly crazy and degrading belief—­on the face of it meant for nothing but to make the family a hell of internecine hatred—­Totemism rendered possible—­nay, inevitable—­the union of hostile groups into large and relatively peaceful tribal societies.  Given the materials as we know them, we never should have educated the world thus; and we do not see why it should thus have been done.  But we are very anthropomorphic, and totally ignorant of the conditions of the problem.

An example of anthropological theory concerning Jehovah was put forth by Mr. Huxley.[1] Mr. Huxley’s general idea of religion as it is on the lowest known level of material culture—­through which the ancestors of Israel must have passed like other people—­has already been criticised.  He denied to the most backward races both cult and religious sanction of ethics.  He was demonstrably, though unconsciously, in error as to the facts, and therefore could not start from the idea that Israel, in the lowest historically known condition of savagery, possessed, or, like other races, might possess, the belief in an Eternal making for righteousness.  ‘For my part,’ he says, ’I see no reason to doubt that, like the rest of the world, the Israelites had passed through a period of mere ghost-worship, and had advanced through ancestor-worship and Fetishism and Totemism to the theological level at which we find them in the Books of Judges and Samuel.’[2]

But why does he think the Israelites did all this?  The Hebrew ghosts, abiding, according to Mr. Huxley, in a rather torpid condition in Sheol, would not be of much practical use to a worshipper.  A reference in Deuteronomy xxvi. 14 (Deuteronomy being, ex hypothesi, a late pious imposture) does not prove much.  The Hebrew is there bidden to remind himself of the stay of his ancestors in Egypt, and to say, ’Of the hallowed things I have not given aught for the dead’—­namely, of the tithes dedicated to the Levites and the poor.  A race which abode for centuries among the Egyptians, as Israel did—­among a people who elaborately