Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/623

Rh the modesty of woman. The nobler spirits among the Hebrews rebelled against both these demands. And, as they were put forth in the name of the dominant religion, the inevitable conclusion followed that that religion itself must be radically wrong. The spirit of opposition thus awakened was aroused into powerful activity when, in the days of Ahab, the queen, supported by an influential priesthood, determined to introduce the forms of Phœnician religion in Israel by measures of force. The royal edicts were resisted, but for a while the rule of the stronger prevailed. The leaders of the opposition were compelled to flee, and, avoiding the habitations of men, to take refuge in wild and solitary places. Thus the rupture was widened into schism, and persecution inflamed the zeal and kindled the energies of that new order of men of whom Elijah is the well-known type.

Through their agency the emotional nature of the Semitic race now found expression in a form of religious worship loftier by far than any that had ever arisen among men. If Baal was the embodiment of Semitic asceticism and Baaltis the type of sensual orgiastic passion, the national God of Israel now became the type of a nobler emotion, the guardian of domestic purity, the source of sanctity, the ideal Father. It is, indeed, the image 'of a just patriarch that fills the mind and wings the fancy of the eldest prophets, when they describe the nature of Jehovah, their God. Jehovah is the husband of the people. Israel shall be his true and loyal spouse. The children of Israel are his children. Unchastity and irreligion are synonymous terms. And thus, if we err not, the peculiar feature of Hebrew character, their faithful attachment to kith and kin, the strength and purity of their domestic affections, serves to explain the peculiar character, the origin and development of the Hebrew religion. And because the essential elements of the new religion were moral elements it could not tolerate the Nature-worship of the heathens; and the way was prepared for the gradual ascendency of the purely spiritual in religion, which after ages of gradual progress constituted the last, the lasting triumph of prophecy.

After ages of development! For we are not to suppose that, in the centuries succeeding Hosea, the doctrines of the prophetic schools had become in any sense the property of the people at large. "The powers that be" were arrayed against them, and the annals of the kings are replete with evidence of their sufferings. It was in the late reign of Josiah that they at last received not only the countenance of the reigning monarch, but also a decisive influence upon the direction of affairs. In that reign a scroll was found in the temple imbued with the doctrine of the unity of God, and breathing the vigorous spirit of the prophets. In it was emphasized the heart's religion in preference to the empty ceremonial of priestly worship. The allegiance of the people was directed toward the God who had elected them from among the nations of the earth, and dire disaster was