nature of Jehovah, as distinct from His relation to men, he allowed them to continue in the same way of thinking with their fathers.  With theoretical truths, which were not at all in demand, He did not occupy himself, but purely with practical questions which were put and urged by the pressure of the times.  The religious starting-point of the history of Israel was remarkable, not for its novelty, but for its normal character.  In all ancient primitive peoples the relation in which God is conceived to stand to the circumstances of the nation—­in other words, 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.  Whatever Jehovah may have been conceived to be in His essential nature-God of the thunderstorm or the like—­this fell more and more into the background as mysterious and transcendental; the subject was not one for inquiry.  All stress was laid upon His activity within the world of mankind, whose ends He made one with His own.  Religion thus did not make men partakers in a divine life, but contrariwise it made God a partaker in the life of men; life in this way was not straitened by it, but enlarged.  The so-called “particularism” of Israel’s idea of God was in fact the real strength of Israel’s religion; it thus escaped from barren mythologisings, and became free to apply itself to the moral tasks which are always given, and admit of being discharged, only in definite spheres.  As God of the nation, Jehovah became the God of justice and of right; as God of justice and right, He came to be thought of as the highest, and at last as the only, power in heaven and earth.

***** In the preceding sketch the attempt has been made to exhibit Mosaism as it must be supposed to have existed on the assumption that the history of Israel commenced with it, and that for centuries it continued to be the ideal root out of which that history continued to grow.  This being assumed, we cannot treat the legislative portion of the Pentateuch as a source from which our knowledge of what Mosaism really was can be derived; for it cannot in any sense be regarded as the starting-point of the subsequent development.  If it was the work of Moses, then we must suppose it to have remained a dead letter for centuries, and only through King Josiah and Ezra the scribe to have become operative in the national history (compare sections 8 and 10).  The historical tradition which has reached us relating to the period of the judges and of the kings of Israel is the main source, though only of course in an indirect way, of our knowledge of Mosaism.  But within the Pentateuch itself also the historical tradition about Moses (which admits of being distinguished, and must carefully be separated, from the legislative, although the latter often clothes itself in narrative form) is in its main features manifestly trustworthy, and can only be explained as resting on actual facts.