I need hardly say, perhaps, that I have no antiquated prejudice against Biblical criticism.  Assuredly the Bible must be studied like any other collection of documents, linguistically, historically, and in the light of the comparative method.  The leading ideas of Wellhausen, for example, are conspicuous for acumen:  the humblest layman can see that.  But one may protest against criticising the Bible, or Homer, by methods like those which prove Shakspeare to have been Bacon.  One must protest, too, against the presentation of inconsistent and probably baseless critical hypotheses in the dogmatic brevity of cheap handbooks.

Yet again, whence comes the moral element in Jehovah?  Mr. Huxley thinks that it possibly came from the ethical practice and theory of Egypt.  In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, ‘a sort of Guide to Spirit Land,’ there are moral chapters; the ghost tells his judges in Amenti what sins he has not committed.  Many of these sins are forbidden in the Ten Commandments.

They are just as much forbidden in the nascent morality of savage peoples.  Moses did not need the Book of the Dead to teach him elementary morals.  From the mysteries of Mtanga he might have learned, also, had he been present, the virtue of unselfish generosity.  If the creed of Jehovah, or of El, retained only as much of ethics as is under divine sanction among the Kurnai, adaptation from the Book of the Dead was superfluous.

The care for the departed, the ritual of the Ka, the intense pre-occupation with the future life, which, far more than its morality, are the essential characteristics of the Book of the Dead—­Israel cared for none of these animistic things, brought none of these, or very little of these, out of the land of Egypt.  Moses was certainly very eclectic; he took only the morality of Egypt.  But as Mr. Huxley advances this opinion tentatively, as having no secure historical authority about Moses, it hardly answers our question, Whence came the moral element in Jehovah?  One may surmise that it was the survival of the primitive divinely sanctioned ethics of the ancient savage ancestors of the Israelite, known to them, as to the Kurnai, before they had a pot, or a bronze knife, or seed to sow, or sheep to herd, or even a tent over their heads.  In the counsels of eternity Israel was chosen to keep burning, however obscured with smoke of sacrifice, that flame which illumines the darkest places of the earth, ’a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel’—­a flame how litten a light whence shining, history cannot inform us, and anthropology can but conjecture.  Here scientific nescience is wiser than the cocksureness of popular science, with her ghosts and fetish-stones, and gods that sprang from ghosts, which ghosts, however, could not be developed, owing to nomadic habits.