It may therefore be tentatively suggested that early Israel had its Ahone in a Being perhaps not yet named Jehovah.  Israel entertained, however, perhaps by reason of ‘nomadic habits,’ only the scantiest concern about ancestral ghosts.  We then find an historical tradition of secular contact between Israel and Egypt, from which Israel emerges with Jehovah for God, and a system of sacrifices.  Regarding Jehovah as a revived memory of the moral Supreme Being whom Israel must have known in extremely remote ages (unless Israel was less favoured than Australians, Bushmen, or Andamanese), we might look on the sacrifices to him as an adaptation from the practices of religion among races more settled than Israel, and more civilised.[22]

Speculation on subjects so remote must be conjectural, but our suggestion would, perhaps, account for sacrifices to Jehovah, paid by a race which, by reason of ‘nomadic habits,’ was never much given to ancestor-worship, but had been in contact with great sacrificing, polytheistic civilisations.  Mr. Huxley, however, while he seems to slur the essential distinction between ghost-gods and the Eternal, grants, later, that ’there are very few people(s?) without additional gods, which cannot, with certainty, be accounted for as deified ancestors.’  Ta-li-y-Tooboo, of course, is one of these gods, as is Jehovah.  Mr. Huxley gives no theory of how these gods came into belief, except the suggestion that ’the polytheistic theology has become modified by the selection of the cosmic or tribal god, as the only god to whom worship is due on the part of that nation,’ without prejudice to the right of other nations to worship other gods.[23] This is ‘monolatry,’ and ’the ethical code, often of a very high order, comes into closer relation with the theological creed,’ why, we are not informed.  Nor do we learn out of what polytheistic deities Jehovah was selected, nor for what reason.  The hypothesis, as usual, breaks down on the close relation between the ethical code and the theological creed, among low savages, with a relatively Supreme Being, but without ancestor-worship, and without polytheistic gods from whom to select a heavenly chief.

Whence came the moral element in the idea of Jehovah?  Mr. Huxley supposes that, during their residence in the land of Goshen (and a fortiori before it), the Israelites ’knew nothing of Jehovah.’[24] They were polytheistic idolaters.  This follows, apparently, from Ezekiel xx. 5:  ’In the day when I chose Israel, and lifted up mine hand unto the seed of the house of Jacob, and made myself known unto them in the land of Egypt.’  The Biblical account is that the God of Moses’s fathers, the God of Abraham, enlightened Moses in Sinai, giving his name as ’I am that I am’ (Exodus iii. 6, 14; translation uncertain).  We are to understand that Moses, a religious reformer, revived an old, and, in the Egyptian bondage, a half-obliterated creed of the ancient nomadic Beni-Israel.  They