Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/219

Rh more violent case of marriage between father and daughter, it did not accomplish that for which it has been so highly praised.

The late prohibition of a man's marriage to his deceased wife's sister can not be successfully defended on any principle of physiology or sociology. It is a blunder that perhaps arose in the transition stage from the matriarchate to the patriarchate method.

—The Indians have been characterized as peculiar among the races of men. One school of writers has pronounced them to be feræ naturæ, and wholly incapable of receiving civilization. Others have held the opposite view, that they were eminently spiritualistic, as was proved by their having preserved the pure pristine faith to a degree beyond all other secluded peoples. Both of these assertions are disproved. When Indians have been allowed reasonable opportunities, they have advanced in civilization, and have thriven under it. While their religion may in one sense be pristine, it does not differ materially from that found in many other regions.

The peculiarity of the Semites, and especially of that branch of them lately styled the Syro-Aramæans (which is only an ethnographic name including the Israelites), has been accepted as an axiom. It was pronounced that they were specially adapted to a spiritual religion; that whether through an exclusive revelation, or because their racial constitution was exceptionally receptive to such revelation, their idiosyncrasy disposed them readily to spiritual ideas, which to modern minds means monotheism. This is not the record of the historical books of the Old Testament, even after their manipulation. The prophets of Israel declared the exact contrary; they denounced their own people as rejecting spiritual truth, and as not deserving the favor of Jahveh.

The historical books of Israel which we possess are not historical records, but are historic legends reduced to writing by writers who had sometimes political and sometimes religious ends in view. The argument of those tales is that all the people habitually worshiped Jahveh, and him alone, during which normal period they were prosperous, but that sometimes under evil influence they abandoned him and fell into disaster, until, after sufficient chastisement, they returned to the true worship. The historic truth is that the old Israelites, when disasters came, as they always do come, gave up the worship of their national god as not a success, and tried the gods of their neighbors. They returned to Jahveh because the other gods did not satisfy them any better. In fact, the people had no fixed or distinct faith, and it is not correct to accuse them of backsliding when they were only vacillating.

The prophets tried to pull the Israelites too rapidly through