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Like all others, the Hebrew race passed through this primitive stage, shared these beliefs, and never quite forgot them. They are hardy plants and thrive with us to-day.1 Hence Hebrew belief in spirits, magic, witchcraft, demon-possession, exorcism, necromancy (Deut. xviii. 10, 11); their tendency to worship sun, moon, stars (Deut. iv. 19); their idea of certain stones, trees, wells, groves, heights as "houses of god"; their devils and gods in animal shape (Gen. iii. 1; Deut. iv. 16 sqq.; Exod. xxxii., etc.); their idea of taboo trees, ark, corpses, foods, even captive foes and their belongings, as God's property (Gen. iii. 3; 2 Sam. vi. 6,7; Josh. vi. 17 sq.); their strange ordeals and recipes for removing "uncleanness," so reminiscent of the medicine-man (Numb. xix.; v. 15 sqq.); their making their children pass through fire (Deut. xviii. ; 2 Kgs. xvi. 3; xxi. 6); and their law: "every first issue of the womb among men and cattle" is "devoted" to Jehovah (originally sacrificed) (Exod. xiii. 2, 12–16; cf. Mic. vi. 7); and their tradition of a day when the firstborn was sacrificed by the builder of a house or city and laid under the threshold or foundation-stone (Zeph. i. 9; Josh. vi. 26), etc., etc. (see also Note, p. 69).

Some will say: "This may all be true, but does it not belittle our idea of Bible and Religion?" Just the reverse! Which is the more inspiring, the Eden picture of man's degeneration from angel to brute, or Evolution's picture of man's ascent from brute angelward? Has evolution lowered our idea of God, strength by others' weakness, our honour and glory by the shame and abasement of others." And can it truly be said either of Christian nations or Churches to-day: "See how these Christians love one another"?

1E.g. are mascots, belief in witchcraft and exorcism, ghosts, superstitions about upsetting salt, sitting 13 at table, unlucky Fridays, evil eye, etc., etc., unknown to-day?

All the same, as one of my critics points out, Romanes' difficulty ever crops up: "Why 100,000 years of animalism and savagery? True, at the end we come to an Isaiah, Socrates, Shakespeare; but what of the misery and suffering of the savages themselves at whose cost we have reached our present stage? The Fall' was a gloomy doctrine, but it had its redeeming points." He is right. Like the whole problem of evil, this puzzle is insoluble with our present knowledge. Job's (xxxviii.-xlii. 7) frame of mind is the present writer's own attitude towards it.

Nature or man by showing us one continuous upward trend, with God at the source and helm of it all, a trend upward from next-to-nothing beginnings to the world of values we know? As we see the infinite trouble and patient pains God has taken with man's education, the more do we believe in man's and our own great possibilities in the loving hands of such a Father. It braces us to actualise those immense possibilities and become what we are, children of God, to "come to ourselves," as sons of God made in His image.

Really, we know not anything as we ought, or to any purpose, till we know how it has come to be what it is. Childish as early man's ideas seem to us, by them we have climbed to our present outlook. The beginnings of writing, mathematics, science, were all rudimentary, yet they interest us profoundly and excite scorn only in foolish minds. Just as the man who invented the ABC was a creative genius of the first rank, so was he who discovered the alphabet of the moral law, or the first man whose heart-thrill of awe made him see a superhuman something in thunder or storm. We curl the lip at Sun-personification, spirits, magic, taboo. God rejoiced to see it; He prompted it. Thus early was He inspiring man, giving "a divine impulse to man's own thoughts," suggesting simple ideas which, ugly as they seem, will of themselves grow into ever deeper truths and ideals. One and all of these early creeds were but "the baby figures of the giant mass of things to come." Look to the end, it crowns all and explains all.

Nature-worship led through Nature to Nature's God; the wide world over, it was at Mother Nature's knees man learnt his first lessons of God. Out of early man's idea of a phantom "double" of himself, his wraith, sprang his belief in an undying soul. His awe of superhuman beings, even demon-spirits, was the seed of his belief in a Personal God. Taboo was his first lesson in reverence and respect for others' rights of property. Magic was his first step to a

RELIGION IN THE MAKING

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relationship with a deity; spell and incantation his first prayer and praise. The bloody ritual of early sacrifices repels us, the common meal with a god makes us smile; yet in these lies the root-idea of all religion,-fellowship with God and man. Our beautiful faith in the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man is but the ripe fruit of this ugly seed sown in man's infancy and long watered with the blood of degrading sacrifices.

Baptise these primitive ideas into God, press them into His service, and you start them on a career of moral and spiritual development which makes them at last the fit expression of the highest religious ideals, as Gen. i.-iii. proves, for it turns their clay into gold. But between primitive man and Genesis the interval is big. In this interval, first Babylonia, then Sinai, stamped indelibly on Israel its distinctive characteristics, as the two following chapters show.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO P. 67.

While correcting this proof-sheet, my attention has been called to Ezek. viii. with its weird picture of primitive cults in a secret chamber of the Temple as late as 590 B.C. It gives us three scenes. (1) The "chamber of imagery": In a side-court, with the "image of jealousy" at its entry, the prophet comes to a hole in the wall, digs into it, and finds a door to a dark cave. There he sees "every form of creeping things and abominable beasts,' and "idols," portrayed on the walls round about, and 70 elders with a priest in their midst, "every man with a censer in his hand," performing their black rites in secret.—The cave, pictures, rites, strongly reproduce the wall-paintings, magic, and totemism of paleolithic cave-men and of Arunta natives to-day. (2) Tammuz worship: At the N. door of the Temple, "behold there sat the women weeping for Tammuz," i.e. the god of vegetation killed by the Sun's fiery arrows. (3) Sun-worship: He sees 25 men "with their backs to the Temple of the Lord, and they worshipped the Sun towards the east,” with a strange ritual: "and lo, they put the branch to their nose."

CHAPTER VI

BABYLONIA, ITS INFLUENCE ON ISRAEL

"THE rediscovery of Babylonia and Assyria through recent excavations has thrown much light on the origin of the traditions and early beliefs of the Hebrews; it has demonstrated that Hebrew history is unintelligible without constant recourse to the data obtained from cuneiform literature." . . . " Babylonia by virtue of early associations and by almost continuous contact, though closer at some periods than at others, is a most important element in Hebrew life and thought." "We are safe in placing the Hebrews among the immigrants who drank deep of Babylonian culture" (Jastrow, Heb. and Bab. Trad., viii., ix., and p. 23).

Babylonia's influence on Hebrew thought is fully admitted to-day. Hence this chapter in a history of Israel. But what we want to know is at what period or periods Babylonia's contact most influenced Hebrew thought. (1) Was it in Abraham's day in Ur of the Chaldees and in Harran (Gen. xi. 31)? or (2) on Israel's arrival in Canaan? or (3) from 734-586 B.C. and during the Exile? Of course, there is a possible fourth alternative: Babylonia, Israel, and Canaan have all three very much in common as to religion, customs and ideas, because they are all Semites from the same cradle. The relationship between Babylonia and Israel is much closer than this, but let us take this clue first, for it will lead us some way to our real goal.

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Babylonians (and Assyrians, their children), Canaanites, and Aramæans (and their offshoot, Hebrews) are all Semites1 whose original cradle is now admitted to be central Arabia. As nomad Arabs they migrated from Arabia in three movements, which are to be viewed not as one big wave of invaders, but as a series of waves lasting a very long period. The Babylonian wave came first. Already in 3000 B.C. We see these Semitic Arab invaders firmly settled in, and owning, Akkad (N. Babylonia) under the famous Sargon, who founded his Semitic dynasty and extended his empire to the Mediterranean, including Canaan. Now, as these Semites had by 3000 B.C. ousted the original inhabitants from N. Babylonia, driven them to Sumer (S. Babylonia), assimilated the advanced civilisation of the Sumerians, and already established an imperial dynasty, they must clearly have established themselves in Babylonia long before 3000 B.C. Their occupation of N. Babylonia indicates that they entered it either by coming through Canaan and Northern Syria or by following the West bank of the Euphrates.

The Canaanite migration came next. Semites are in possession of Canaan as far back as we know. A Semitic wave from Arabia moving northward, then westward, both founded the First Dynasty at Babylon (2275-1926) of which the famous Hammurabi (21232081) is a king, and also peopled the region to the west of the Euphrates, including the Mediterranean seaboard. This whole district was known as "the land of the Amurru " (= Amorites). It is impossible to distinguish between these Amorites and Canaanites,

1 Semites may be divided thus: E. Semites Babylonians (and Assyrians); -W. Semites="men of Amurru," i.e. Canaanites and Amorites, hard to differentiate; Aramæans (and Hebrews) ;-Central Semites = Arabians ;-S. Semites Sabaans and Ethiopian Semites.

Some scholars, e.g. Jastrow, Meyer, Price, say the Semites preceded the Sumerians, but the weight of authority is against them, and, as Pinches points out, so is the evidence of the oldest monuments where figures, with head and face clean shaven, i.e. non-Semitic, precede those of the Semitic period in chronological order.-Yet, strangely, the Sumerian deities are bearded.