for their murdered children on the banks of the Nile, can we escape the inevitable conclusion that Hebrew and Delphian oracles were equally illusory?

The results of theocratic superstition having culminated in these Syrian atrocities, the time had come for trusting more in man and less in Providence. Horrified by the unmerited sufferings of his unhappy countrymen, the aged Mattathias, appealing to the courage of despair, raised the standard of revolt against Syrian despotism; and entered upon the patriotic struggle which, continued with varying fortunes by his heroic sons, achieved results giving to the Jews a brief interval of national life under the Asmonæan princes.

The outlines of this great Hebrew drama are traced in the pages of 1 Maccabees-a work which approaches nearer to the form of history than any other of the Hebrew annals; and, unlike the more mythical version of 2 Maccabees, depicts Hebrew vicissitudes in harmony with the natural sequence of events, unbroken by one vestige of the supernatural.

So exemplary was the piety of the nation at this disastrous epoch of their history that one of the first events of the war was the massacre of a thousand Hebrews, who preferred death to resisting the enemy on the sabbath. The common sense of Mattathias overruled this suicidal piety; and henceforth, the law of self-preservation controlled the observance of the fourth commandment. The sagacious sons of the Hebrew Tribune further sustained the claims of human reason by trusting more to skilful strategy and astute diplomacy than to the predictions of prophets and the promises of Jehovah.

In the fourth generation of the Asmonæan family independence was won, and Aristobulus I. assumed the title of king. The nation remained faithful to the law of Moses and the worship of Jehovah : but we fail to trace, in their domestic annals or foreign relationship, the faintest vestige of miraculous favour towards a chosen race. The later generations of the Asmonæan princes, corrupted by power, disclose their degeneracy in domestic crimes; rival candidates claim the throne of David, and contending factions invite the arbitration of Roman generals to establish legitimacy or sanction usurpation. And when Pompey, Antony, or Cæsar become the arbiters of Hebrew destiny; the time is at hand. when prophetic dreams of a chosen race and a partisan God must perish in the presence of a practical Providence which then, as now, bestowed its favours on the most skilful generals and the most powerful armies.

CHAPTER XIII.

CONCLUSIONS.

WHAT, therefore, are our conclusions? As we hold no authentic records of Hebrew antiquity, we necessarily assign to patriarchal supernaturalism a place among the myths of ancient Greece and Rome. Assuming that Abraham was the founder of the Hebrew race, and honestly accepted dreams and visions as divine revelation, his conceptions of Divinity fall infinitely short of the higher ideal of Aryan races, as defined in the Sacred Scriptures of India; and we doubt the monotheism of a man whose Deity partakes of a feast so much less worthy of Divinity1 than the ambrosial banquets of Olympian gods. It is true that Abraham's mysterious Guest claims jurisdiction over the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah; but when he exclaims, 'I will go down now and see whether they have done according to the cry of it which is come unto me, and if not I will know,' we miss the characteristic attributes of the Supreme Ruler of the universe.

We do not question that the children of Israel once lived in Egypt, and went forth under the leadership of Moses in search of other settlements; but the sensational miracles of the Exodus and the desert are the obvious creations of imaginative Piety, traditionally glorifying

1 Gen. xviii.

the national God, in generations remote from the alleged marvels of Egypt and Sinai.

A national Deity being indispensable to the success of his enterprise, Moses selected an Egyptian god for Hebrew worship, depicted as the imageless Theban Deity, and introduced to his expectant votaries as the great I AM-a title borrowed from the inscription in front of the temple of the Egyptian Isis: 'I am all that hath been, and that is, and that shall be.' We must not, however, assume that the Jehovah of the prophets came out of Egypt as depicted in their pages. Contact with the inhabitants of Palestine had considerably modified Hebrew ideals of Divinity by the time of Samuel and David; and could Moses have then risen from the dead, he would scarcely have recognised his Egyptian Deity in a God conjured by music instead of Urim and Thummim.

The theological studies of Moses in the divinity school of Heliopolis had obviously resulted in scepticism as to the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body. He therefore excluded these Egyptian doctrines from Hebrew creeds, and substituted Jehovah's promise of worldly prosperity as the sole reward of piety—a scepticism which we find reproduced in the language of David,1 Solomon,2 and Hezekiah, but abandoned after the Restoration by all but those faithful disciples of Moses, the unbelieving Sadducees.

3

In the legendary compilations of Ezra, Moses is depicted in direct personal communication with Jehovah ; but as the prophet followed the example of the heathen by establishing a system of divination, the scriptural

1 Psalms vi. 5.

2 Eccl s. ix. 10.

3 Isaiah xxxviii. 18.

formula, 'Thus saith the Lord,' was obviously nothing more than the oracular response of Urim and Thummim, and the theory of theocratic government an ignis fatuus which lured the nation to destruction.

As the policy of Moses involved religious intolerance,` the character of the Hebrew Deity harmonised with the design of the prophet. The compilers of Genesis tell us that Elohim created man in His own image; but the Hebrew prophet depicts the Hebrew God in the image of Man, capricious, vainglorious, jealous, wrathful, cruel, revengeful, favouring the Chosen Race under ceremonial conditions, and persecuting all without the pale of Judaism, with a sanguinary ferocity characteristic of the savage barbarism of primitive Humanity.

A Deity of this type could have no pretensions to the supreme government of the universe, for the order of nature demands providential immutability; and divine partisanship is the negation of divine justice. Jehovah was, therefore, the tribal Deity of the Hebrews, admitting the existence of other gods through jealousy of their pretensions. Hebrew annals, from Exodus to the Captivity, record the prevalence of intermittent idolatry among the children of Israel, which meant, not disbelief in Jehovah, but desire to participate in the favours of alien gods, apparently lavished with generous profusion on their peculiar people.

When the children of Israel feared, in the absence of Moses, that Jehovah had abandoned them in the wilderness, they did not disavow His existence, but appealed to an old Egyptian friend, Apis, symbolised by a golden calf. When Solomon, in deference to his foreign wives, erected altars to alien gods, his divided allegiance