The Mosaic theocracy, the residuum of a ruined state, is itself not a state at all, but an unpolitical artificial product created in spite of unfavourable circumstances by the impulse of an ever-memorable energy:  and foreign rule is its necessary counterpart.  In its nature it is intimately allied to the old Catholic church, which was in fact its child.  As a matter of taste it may be objectionable to speak of the Jewish church, but as a matter of history it is not inaccurate, and the name is perhaps preferable to that of theocracy, which shelters such confusion of ideas.

XI.II.2.  The Mosaic theocracy appears to show an immense retrogression.  The law of Jehovah should denote what is characteristic of His people over against the heathen.  But this certainly did not consist in the cultus of Israel:  it would be vain labour to seek in this and that slight variation between the Hebrew and the Greek ritual a difference of principle between them.  The cultus is the heathen element in the Israelite religion—­ the word heathen not being understood, of course, in an ignoble or unworthy sense.  If the Priestly Code makes the cultus the principal thing, that appears to amount to a systematic decline into the heathenism which the prophets incessantly combated and yet were unable to eradicate.  It will be readily acknowledged that at the constitution of the new Jerusalem the prophetic impulses were deflected by a previously existing natural tendency of the mass on which they had to operate.  Yet in every part of the legal worship we see the most decided traces of their influence.  We have seen to what a large extent that worship is everywhere marked by a centralising tendency.  This tendency is not connected in the Priestly Code with opposition to improper or foreign worship; yet it must be interpreted as a polemical measure; and if it be regarded as an axiom necessary in the Priestly Code from the nature of the case, that is only saving that the demands of the prophets had prevailed most completely in a field where they had the greatest obstacles to contend with.  Exclusive monolatry is by no means innate in the cultus; it can only be deduced from considerations which are foreign to the nature of the cultus:  it is the antitype of strict monotheism.  The prohibition of images, too, in the worship of the Deity, is not expressly insisted on, as in Deuteronomy, but is a provision which is taken for granted; so little is this position in danger of question that even doubtful and repugnant elements are embodied in the worship and assimilated by it without hesitation.  The golden ephod, denounced by Isaiah, has become an insignificant decoration of the high-priest:  talismans, forbidden even by Ezekiel, are allowed (Numbers xv. 37-41), but the object of them is “that ye may look upon them and remember all the commandments of Jehovah, and do them, and that ye follow not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye used to go a whoring.”  The gross idolatry, with which the expression znh is always connected in other passages, is by this time out of the question:  the heart itself with its lawless motions is the strange God, whose service is forbidden.