est my downsitting and uprising; thou understandest my thought forever" (Psa. cxxxix. 2).

This omnipresent God has no rival. The ancient deities are dead. "Thus saith Jehovah, king and redeemer of Israel, Jehovah of Hosts. I am the first and I am the last, and beside me there is no God" (Isa. xliv. 6). This God is as strong as He is universal. "Ah Lord Jehovah, behold, thou hast made the heavens and the earth by thy great power and by thy outstretched arm. There is nothing too hard for thee, the great and almighty God; Jehovah of Hosts is his name, great in council and mighty in work, whose eyes are upon all the ways of the sons of men" (Jer. xxxii. 17-19).

Not alone is Jehovah enthroned but He also has a law. He himself is righteous in all His ways and holy in all His works. The whole earth is full of His glory because men when they praise Him may cry, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of Hosts!" but Jehovah is as compassionate as He is great and holy and righteous. If the wicked will forsake their evil ways and evil thoughts by repentance, they may find life. The heavenly throne increased in splendor as the glory of the earthly throne grew dim. This universal and triumphant Lord quickened in the souls of His servants the psalm of an unquenchable hope. He shared in the sorrows of

His people. He would level the mountains, lift up the valleys, and make the wilderness blossom as a garden. Through all the painful centuries men had been groping their way. They had worked with such fragments of the divine idea as they could find and use. They had built altars. They had painfully constructed rituals, but at length they had ended all the weary journey and from the summit of their painful way they had caught the vision of the everlasting truth and beauty, and they spoke their discovery to the souls of men in living words that can never perish.

CHAPTER VII

SACRED PERSONS

THE MAKING OF THE PRIEST

THE ideas of God, of Providence, of Immortality, are fundamental to religion. The idea of duty in its modern sense is a later addition, but some form of the idea of duty to God is as primitive as the thought of God itself. Different peoples differ in the order and in the insistence of these ideas. With the Hebrews on the whole, the idea of God was the strongest factor in the making of their institutions. Where ancestor worship is the chief cult of the people the idea of immortality is the most important. India and China, each in its own way, have laid emphasis upon conduct. The idea of Providence has its dark as well as its bright side, and these are both reflected in forms of worship. The early gods are whimsical and passion-driven. The old Greek poets thought they could not be depended upon nor their actions predicted. They were also set free from the usual moral limitations that belong to men. Perhaps the greatest practical gain to the religious convictions of the world is that

given to us by the later Hebrews when they disclose a God who Himself lives by law and reigns in righteousness. The institutions of worship have their development and are efforts to embody in visible forms the great ideas which furnish the basis of religion.

The development of associate human life marks the distinct unfolding of particular institutions. It is by no means true that all civilizations begin as the Hebrew with a patriarchial age. That required a pastoral people. But in the early social group there are no such distinct institutions as family, church, and state. The relation of church and state is not so much one of conscious union as it is that the two functions are performed by one form of organization. This appears in highly developed civilizations as among the Egyptians, and, to a large extent, among the Greeks and Romans. The supremacy of the church in ancient Egypt is seen, where the king could only be crowned after having become a priest. The sacred and secular duties were two sides of one office. When a social group comes to have a definite order, so far at least as to have one man at its head, in the earlier times domestic, religious, and political functions are performed by the chief. Leadership of the horde or clan fell to the man who was strongest or bravest,

but in the beginning his duties were not regular or defined. It was the crisis of danger that brought him to the front. Because he could fight he was also permitted to rule. At a time when only the animal wants were insistent and the ability to satisfy them was small, the physical life was the chief object of interest. It was impossible for crude and undeveloped men without organized industries, dependent at first upon hunting and fishing, and the native fruits of the earth, to live in large companies. The smallness of the early social group prevented anything like full organization, just as much as the lack of capacity made men unfit for varied duties. All of the higher development of a people, as well as the enlargement of the size of the social group, needed the foundation of material success, and first of all was the importance of a surplus food supply. The beginnings of agriculture are the beginnings of a possible civilization.

The head of the clan, or tribe, is at once soldier, law giver, judge and priest; as the functions are all found in one person, so the exercise of them has no rule except that of certain customs, growing with time, which are handed down from generation to generation. When prosperity increases, the group enlarges, the official functions become more varied, and, at the same time, more definite. Early laws