It is to be observed here that Israel's holiness is represented not as a present condition, but as a future promise. It is not its actual state, it is its future destiny. But what is its significance? It is simply a declaration that Israel shall be Yahveh's property. Out of the whole earth he will choose this one people, and by that act he will withdraw it from all other nations and set it apart as his own. That state of detachment, that appropriation to him alone, will be holiness. Yahveh and Israel will stand to each other in a relation to which no one else will be admitted. It is a relation which shall hereafter be constituted, and it can rest on one foundation only, Israel's obedience, its adherence to the terms of the covenant by which Yahveh would keep them separate from the nations of the world.

This covenant of course implied that worship should be paid to Yahveh alone; and inasmuch as the only known form of worship was ritual, the arrangements for worship in the First Code assume this form. The worship of other gods is strictly prohibited; idolatry likewise is forbidden; but the believer's approach to Yahveh by the usual methods of sacrifice is not limited to one place; the choice is free, the altar may be reared on any spot without restriction; the gift may be given anywhere, and the divine blessing will follow. This was the custom of primitive Yahvism, and the history of Israel shows us the whole land covered with local sanctuaries, by means of which constant expression was given to the relation between the people and its God. That relation of holiness, which the prophetic narrator, standing in imagination at its cradle among the peaks of Sinai, describes as something yet to grow and be, the legislator can only conceive as already established. The very act by which Yahveh lays his commands on Israel and on none other, implies that they are already his: they are the chosen objects of his favour: and with the privilege comes also the responsibility. Already adopted as Yahveh's property, they must behave as becomes this lofty ownership: and accordingly the legislative code demands of Israel the conduct conformable to holiness. But what is that

conduct? The only requirement which the code formulates is this:

Ye shall be holy men unto me, and flesh in the field that is torn of beasts ye shall not eat: ye shall cast it unto the dogs (Ex. xxii. 31).

Such carcases were regarded as defiled: among the "men of holiness," the men who belonged to Yahveh, nothing polluting must enter: even their very food must be clean. Here is the first faint note of what is afterwards to become the full chorus of Levitical demands. The arrangements of the First Code represent an early stage of popular Yahvism, under the influence of ideas which by way of contrast we call Prophetic. Monotheism is not defined, but it is trembling into full consciousness; monolatry is enjoined, and idol-worship repudiated. The First Code thus endeavours to give practical shape to the higher teaching spreading among the prophets-Elijah and Elisha led the contest for Yahveh against the Baal, but they directed no polemic against the calves of Yahveh or the high-places-and may be taken to represent the general aim of religion at the beginning of the eighth century B.C. Under what influences was the next step in advance to be taken?

III.

A glance at the history of Yahvism under the monarchy reveals to us at once a most important fact. It was the national religion of both kingdoms, of the north as well as the south. Its vigour in Ephraim cannot be disputed. It produced an order of prophets whose leaders took the destinies of the nation into their hands, and threw down and set up kings. It gave expression to the national view of its history in collections of the traditions of the past from the patriarchal period onwards; it uttered the national aspirations in poems such as the Blessing of Moses, where the high-place assigned to the tribe of Levi shows already the growth of the sacred order and its importance in the life of the people. It had plenty of sanctuaries, it had powerful

priesthoods. Through the mouth of Hosea it proclaimed the first anticipations of the Gospel in the delineation of the love of Yahveh for his erring child. But it was doomed to disappear. It fell with the fall of Samaria, and was extinguished by the Assyrian invasion. The deported captives struggled for a time to maintain it in their foreign homes. But it had no vitality to maintain its life. It lost its independence, it languished and died, so that among the multitude of religions of the great Mesopotamian empire no trace of it remained, while the feeble effort made to revive it on its native soil had no permanent

success.

By-and-by it was the turn of Jerusalem. The Chaldeans grasped the power which Assyria could no longer hold. Once more must Judah suffer as the collision between the mighty forces of the Euphrates and the Nile approached. The same doom fell upon the city of David which had overtaken its younger rival. The same fate threatened the religion of the southern as of the northern state. But instead of succumbing to decay and dissolution it arose with a new might: that which seemed to threaten it with complete destruction proved instead the necessary condition of its purification. Had Jerusalem fallen a hundred and twenty years before under Sennacherib, who can tell what might have been the result? The Yahvism of Isaiah might then have shared the fate of the sister faith of Hosea. Can we in any way account for the different spiritual issues of similar outward events; and can we trace their bearings on the problem we have in hand?

IV.

The survival of Yahvism after the fall of Judah must have been due to the superior moral and religious forces which played through it upon the national life. The first and most obvious of these is the development of prophetism. The prophecy of the eighth century, as the organ of the higher Yahvism, necessarily threw itself into the conflict

with the popular heathenism which surrounded it on every hand. It protested against every intrusion of impure Canaanite cultus into the true worship, and while feeling its way towards articulate expression of those truths of the sole deity and absolute dominion of Yahveh which it had already implicitly grasped, it denounced every species of idolatry whether practised in his rival's name or in his own. It called for reform, but it expected that reform to be divinely wrought. That Israel must realise its destiny, and rise to the height of its calling as Yahveh's holy people, it was confident. But the actual Israel could not do this, and the prophetic delineations of its state show us why not. Prophetism, therefore, applying the fundamental principles of Yahveh's righteousness to the condition of the nation which claimed to be his, could see only one way of lifting Israel to the ideal elevation on which it ought to stand. Chastisement first, then purification, was the invariable order of its thought. In Isaiah's day, when the Assyrian power loomed larger and larger, as one after another of the Syrian kingdoms fell into its hands, it was to this that the prophet's eyes turned with a strange mingling of stern warning and triumphant hope. From the outset of his ministry this seemed to have been the message committed to him: invasion must sweep through the land; captivity and suffering must do their cleansing work upon the people; but though the tree should be cut down to its very roots, there was yet within it a promise of renewed life. How did this harmonise with the idea of the holy people? It was the first step to its true embodiment in a living community which had hitherto failed to give it actual being.

When Yahveh shall have removed men afar off, and the deserted space shall be large in the midst of the land, should there yet be a tenth, this again shall be exterminated, as the terebinth and the oak, of which, after felling, a stock remaineth, a holy seed is the stock thereof (Is. vi. 13).

What is this "holy seed"? The passage does not clearly determine for us. It may mean nothing more than a seed dedicated to Yahveh, and so inviolable and secure; but else

where the high significance of the promise appears much more plain.

It shall come to pass, he who is left in Zion and remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, every one who is written down for life in Jerusalem, when Yahveh shall have washed off the filth of the daughters of Zion, and cleansed the blood of Jerusalem in her midst, by a blast of judgment, and a blast of extermination (Is. iv. 3, 4).

Here it is plain that holiness implies something much more than a mere relation of property between Yahveh as owner, and Israel as owned. It is the condition of those who have been purified by a "blast of judgment," which would exterminate all guilty idolatries and every species of falsehood and oppression, and fit the survivors to enter the higher life of the redeemed people. We know what glowing pictures Isaiah drew of the future for his nation, thus initiated by the Assyrian invasions; how near it seemed to him; what marvellous harmony should pervade all nature; what gracious justice should adorn the throne; what peace should spread among the nations; what majestic supremacy should belong to Israel. The Assyrians did indeed come, and though Samaria fell, Jerusalem was saved. But the reign of righteousness did not set in. The monarchy was established with greater solidity than ever. The dynasty of David received a new lease of power, but not the sevenfold spirit (Is. xi. 2); the people were not purified by danger and loss; and the issue of the conflict, though it may have strengthened the hands of the reforming party for a little while, was soon lost. The great prophetic ideal of a regenerated people made holy to Yahveh was cut off from the fulfilment that had seemed so near, and must wait for some fresh crisis in the nation's destinies.

V.

Hezekiah passed away, and Manasseh proved in every way the exact opposite to the prince whose advent Isaiah had celebrated in such lofty strains. The very existence of Yahvism was in danger. Foreign usages of every description were poured into the country, became fashionable at