and clans continued as before to be the ordinary constitution, if one can apply such a word as constitution at all to an unorganised conglomeration of homogeneous elements.  What there was of permanent official authority lay in the hands of the elders and heads of houses; in time of war they commanded each his own household force, and in peace they dispensed justice each within his own circle.  But this obviously imperfect and inefficient form of government showed a growing tendency to break down just in proportion to the magnitude of the tasks which the nation in the course of its history was called upon to undertake.  Appeal to Jehovah was always in these circumstances resorted to; His court was properly that of last resort, but the ordinary authorities were so inadequate that it had often enough to be applied to.  Theocracy, if one may so say, arose as the complement of anarchy.  Actual and legal existence (in the modern sense) was predicable only of each of the many clans; the unity of the nation was realised in the first instance only through its religion.  It was out of the religion of Israel that the commonwealth of Israel unfolded itself,—­not a HOLY state, but THE state.  And the state continued to be, consciously, rooted in religion, which prevented it from quitting or losing its rapport with the soil from which it had originally sprung.  With the intermediate and higher stages of political organisation, with the building of the upper structure, however, religion had no concern; they were too far removed from the foundation.  The derivative, which did not carry immediately in itself its own title to exist, was a matter of indifference to it; what had come into being it suffered to go its own way as soon as it was capable of asserting its independence.  For this reason it always turned by preference to the future, not in a utopian but in a thoroughly practical way; by a single step only did it keep ahead of the present.  It prepared the way for such developments as are not derived from existing institutions, but spring immediately from the depths in which human society has its secret and mysterious roots.

The expression “Jehovah is the God of Israel,” accordingly, meant that every tosk of the nation, internal as well as external, was conceived as holy.  It certainly did not mean that the almighty Creator of heaven and earth was conceived of as having first made a covenant with this one people that by them He might be truly known and worshipped.  It was not as if Jehovah had originally been regarded as the God of the universe who subsequently became the God of Israel; on the contrary, He was primarily Israel’s God, and only afterwards (very long afterwards) did He come to be regarded as the God of the universe.  For Moses to have given to the Israelites an “enlightened conception of God” would have been to have given them a stone instead of bread; it is in the highest degree probable that, with regard to the essential