simply shows universal belief in polytheism. When the king of Assyria colonised Samaria with strangers from Babylon and Cutha, their neglect of Jehovah, the local Deity, evoked devouring lions, which disappeared on their combining Hebrew with heathen worship.1 The theory of divine partisanship and a chosen race could, in fact, only have originated in an age of universal belief in local and tribal deities, and proved the very mainstay of constructive polytheism; for is it not more rational to assume a plurality of gods, severally devoted to the interests of various communities, than to limit Divinity to one God, negligent of all the world's inhabitants but the favoured members of a Semitic tribe?

Do we therefore revive the Gnostic theory of primitive Christian sects who accepted Jehovah as an inferior God? On the contrary, we see in him as imaginative a creation as the Egyptian Osiris or the Grecian Jove, and read the fabulous records of his Theocracy as we study the poetic imagery of Homer, depicting the action of the Olympian gods.

How, therefore, if the ancient Hebrews were polytheists, did they become the confirmed monotheists of later generations? After centuries of polytheistic worship, shared with Jehovah, Apis, Baal, Ashtoreth, Molech, and any other god or goddess through whose favour they hoped to attain prosperity or escape disaster, the Hebrews entered Babylon, and, on its conquest by the Persians, came in contact with an Aryan race of monotheists, worshippers of Aura-mazda (Ormazd), 'the great Giver of Life,' who created the heavens, the earth, and its inhabitants, placed the Persian kings upon their 1 2 Kings xvii.

thrones, and sustained their victorious empire. The Hebrews embraced the great principle of monotheism ; Cyrus identified Ormazd with Jehovah, and thus Aryan and Semitic piety united in sympathetic worship of one supreme Creator and Controller of the universe, who still remains the God of modern Jews and Gentiles.

The Aryan Ormazd was a Deity of infinite beneficence: the Persians, therefore, attributed evil to Ahriman, 'the Death-dealing Spirit,' the source of frost, poverty, disease, crime, death, and all the other evils which afflict humanity. The Jews also introduced this dual principle into their theology, as dramatised in the Book of Job; and the Persian Ahriman, surrounded by malevolent spirits, became the Hebrew Satan and his fallen angels, whose malign influence evokes calamity; whilst the sanguinary Jehovah of more remote antiquity, deprived of the authorship of evil,1 was gradually transformed into the heavenly Father of the age of Jesus.

Thus, on the friendly contact of Aryan and Semitic races, stood the Deistical problem. The Persians worship one God. The Hebrews worship one God. Therefore Ormazd and Jehovah are one.

Let us test the inference by introducing another ancient race of monotheists on the scene. Herodotus informs us that the Getes believed in the immortality of the soul, and worshipped Zamolxis as the only true God. Ormazd, Jehovah, and Zamolxis are therefore one. But how shall we establish their unity? Ormazd, a beneficent Deity; Jehovah, a ferocious God; Zamolxis, appeased by human sacrifice! Are not these uncongenial Divinities but ideal phantoms fashioned in har

1 Isa. xlv. 7; Amos iii. 6.

mony with the relative civilisation of human communities, and are we not thus deprived of all historic evidence of the true nature of Divinity? Yet modern theologians introduce the same fallacy into Christian creeds, and exhaust the resources of apologetic piety in the vain effort to identify the barbarous Jehovah of the ancient Hebrews with the heavenly Father of Jesus of Nazareth.

When the Jews of the Restoration undertook the compilation of a national literature, the recent adoption of monotheism sanctioned recourse to the traditions and records of other nations, in search of Elohim's dealings with primeval Man, before His revelation as the Hebrew Jehovah. The editors of Genesis, therefore, borrowed, from Chaldean and other foreign sources, the legends of Creation, Paradise, the Fall of Man, semi-human giants, a universal Flood, and the postdiluvian confusion of tongues—all of which they amalgamated with the traditions of their race in the imaginative pages of constructive history; and thus compromised revelation by a fabulous cosmogony and mythical annals, which assume the form of fiction in the light of modern research.

From the legend of a decalogue, lithographed by the finger of God, we learn that Moses introduced the moral precepts of the Egyptians to his countrymen as a divine revelation: but, even centuries after possession of the Ten Commandments, Semitic ethics fall immeasurably short of the moral culture of Egyptian citizens and Achaian Greeks, as disclosed on comparison of monumental evidence and Homeric song with the licentious and sanguinary annals of the children of Israel.

When the Hebrew oracle of Urim and Thummim became, from some unknown cause, a lost secret to the Levitical Priesthood, self-appointed prophets adopted the vain illusion of revelation evoked by artistic minstrelsy, and thus Imposture, Fanaticism, or Insanity might utter oracles as the voice of God, until this superstition also perished with the lapse of time, and Hebrew Prophets became as voiceless as Urim and Thummim.

The prophetic gaze of Hebrew Nâbis did not vainly scan the invisible horizon of remote futurity, but watched the shadows of impending events susceptible of human forecast; and the fanciful adaptation of their vague predictions to the historical events of later centuries is the pious work of imaginative theologians, sustaining dogmas by predictive miracles, and even carrying Hebrew prophets into the nineteenth century, to condemn a world to premature dissolution which science tells us will still roll onwards, freighted with the organised evolutions of remote futurity, thousands of centuries after the prophetic craze shall have been classed by coming savans among the theological fossils of dead religions.

The theocratic policy which fostered international hostility, and deprived the Hebrews of all friendly allies, had foredoomed them to that destruction which inevitably falls on nations controlled by the absorbing egotism which ignores the natural rights of alien races. The secular struggle of the heroic Maccabees came too late in Hebrew history to establish a kingdom or found an empire; and, when all hope of victory through natural means had perished, the old inheritance of Fanaticism revived in Messianic dreams of national restoration.

In Babylonian exile the Jews had heard of Persian expectation of a coming Saviour and Regenerator of Mankind; and, with characteristic egotism, had assumed that the Messiah of Aryan dreams was the Hebrew Prince predestined by Semitic prophets to restore the throne of David and renew the glories of Solomon. As all reasonable expectation of national independence vanished, the fatal fascination of a phantom empire transformed Messianic enthusiasm into the fierce fanaticism which rashly challenged the invincible power of Rome, and invited the final catastrophe which made Jerusalem the funeral pyre of an expiring nation.

How vain to seek for miracles in these most natural events! Josephus, who had visited Rome in the reign of Nero, warned his countrymen against the insanity of defying imperial power, and tells us they were lured to destruction by the ambiguous oracle of Sacred Scripture predicting that, about that time, a Hebrew ruler should become the governor of the habitable earth.' In the hopeless conflict with invincible legions produced by the prophetic superstition, the Hebrews were, therefore, simply vanquished, as Carthage, Gaul, or Britain, by the irresistible power of a great military empire, and in the hour of victory, Vespasian's son finally destroyed the fiction of a Chosen Race miraculously preserved by supernatural power.

Controlled by the common sense of Josephus, the Jews might have remained the prosperous citizens of a Roman province, and escaped the future miseries of a Peculiar People' through gradual amalgamation with surrounding nations. They might even have fulfilled the oracle, through some great Hebrew soldier of

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