Certainly it could, but as, in many regions (America, Australia), we find Totemism and the belief in a benevolent Supreme Being co-existing among savages, when first observed by Europeans, we cannot possibly say dogmatically whether a rough monotheism or whether Totemism came first in order of evolution.  This holds as good of Israel (if once totemistic) as it does of Pawnees or Kurnai.  Stade has overlooked these well-known facts, and his opinion filters into a cheap hand-book, and is set in examinations![15]

We also learn from Mr. Oxford’s popular manual of German Biblical conjecture that ’Jehovah was not represented as a loving Father, but as a Being easily roused to wrath,’ a thing most incident to loving fathers.

Again, Mr. Oxford avers that ’the old Israelites knew no distinction between physical and moral evil....  The conception of Jehovah’s holiness had nothing moral in it’ (p. 90).  This rather contradicts Wellhausen:  ’In all ancient primitive peoples ... religion furnishes a motive for law and morals; in the case of none did it become so with such purity and power as in that of the Israelites.’[16]

We began by examining Mr. Huxley’s endeavours to find traces of ancestor-worship (in his opinion the origin of Jehovah-worship) among the Israelites.  We next criticised Mr. Spencer’s efforts in the same quest, and the more dogmatic assertions of Mr. Oxford and Stade.  We now return to Mr. Huxley’s account of the evolution from ghost-cult to the cult of Jehovah.

From the history of the Witch of Endor, which Mr. Huxley sees no reason to regard as other than a sincere statement of what really occurred, he gathers that the Witch cried out, ‘I see Elohim.’  These Elohim proved to be the phantasm of the dead Samuel.  Moved by this hallucination the Witch uttered a veridical premonition, totally adverse to her own interests, and uncommonly dangerous to her life.  This is, psychically, interesting.  The point, however, is that Elohim is a term equivalent to Red Indian Wakan, Fijian Kahu, Maori or Melanesian Mana, meaning the ‘supernatural,’ the vaguely powerful—­in fact X. This particular example of Elohim was a phantasm of the dead, but Elohim is also used of the highest Divine Being, therefore the highest Divine Being is of the same genus as a ghost—­so Mr. Huxley reasons.  ’The difference which was supposed to exist between the different Elohim was one of degree, not of kind.’[17]

’If Jehovah was thus supposed to differ only in degree from the undoubtedly zoomorphic or anthropomorphic “gods of the nations,” why is it to be assumed that he also was not thought to have a human shape?’ He was thought to have a human shape, at one time, by some theorists:  no doubt exists on that head.  That, however, is not where we demur.  We demur when, because an hallucination of the Witch of Endor (probably still incompletely developed) is called by her Elohim, therefore the highest Elohim is said by Mr. Huxley to differ from a ghost only in degree, not in kind. Elohim, or El, the creative, differs from a ghost in kind, because he, in Hebrew belief, never was a ghost, he is immortal and without beginning.