fluence on their imaginations, especially as they find it in a book which they are taught to reverence and which they are accustomed to hear exalted for its moral teachings. It is quite true that almost every one of these tales is followed by the account of the revenge taken upon the criminal, either by God or by some blood relative; but the revenges themselves are none too highly moral in tone. The justice meted out to Ammon, who assaulted Tamar, was a combination of lynch law and fratricide, plus violation of hospitality it rather suggests the murder of Rasputin. The loss of David's first son by Bathsheba in infancy, after the classic tale of the killing of Uriah, cannot be considered a very terrible punishment for the double crime of adultery and murder, especially as David, who already had six sons, showed a most reprehensible cheerfulness immediately after the occurrence.

Henry Drummond is said to have received many letters from men and women whose faith found its stumblingblock in the Old Testament, "its discrepancies, its rigorous laws, its pitiless tempers, its open treatment of sexual questions, the atrocities which are narrated by its histories and sanctioned by its laws." What Henry Drummond did to remove that stumbling-block I do not know; but for the present generation the way seems to me to be made clear by the application of the standards and methods of literary and historical criticism to the books of the Bible. With their help one gets a clearer idea of the primitive morality and the primitive ideas of God which prevailed in those days; and gets rid of the false supposition that from the legendary moment when Moses came down from the Mount bearing the two tables of stones, the ancient Hebrews lived under a moral dispensation equal to that evolved through thirty-five subsequent centuries.

The books upon the subject, most of them written during the past fifty years, are a joy to a disputatious and adventuring mind. Pioneer work was done in the last years of the eighteenth century by Jean Astruc, a French physician, who launched the theory that the compiler of Genesis used two earlier documents, in one of which God was spoken of as Jehovah, in the other as Elohim. From a French prison during the Revolution Thomas Paine sent forth The Age of Reason, which was the first book to challenge the verbal inspiration of the Bible in a form which

reached the masses of the people. He and his publishers were severely persecuted, socially and legally; and his name is still anathema maranatha to the uninstructed orthodox, who apparently do not know that practically all Biblical scholars of academic standing have given up the theory of verbal inspiration, and are applying to their study of the Bible the accepted standards of literary and historical criticism. (Let any one who doubts this statement look up the matter in that stronghold of conservative learning, the Encyclopedia Britannica, noting the references there made to the Encyclopedia Biblica.) "How shall they learn without a preacher?" It would seem a heavy score against the intelligence of the Christian ministry that it has left its congregations uninstructed in the history of the composition of the Bible, and therefore an easy prey to the ridicule of the sceptic.

Historical criticism, bitterly as it has been assailed, is the salvation of the Old Testament as a religious book. Only as the record of the progressive evolution of the idea of God among a primitive but deeply religious people, can the God of the Old Testament be related to the God of Jesus Christ and the Christian Church today. You cannot get away from the plain facts of the narrative: the early Hebrews, up to the time of Hosea at least, believed that their Jehovah was but the best of many gods, jealous of other gods, stern and revengeful, exacting an eye for an eye, and under no obligations to play fair with any people but the Hebrews.

Moreover, if we are to take the morality of the Old Testament as inspired of God for our edification, as the orthodox have so emphatically insisted is the case, we shall not always be edified. Take, for instance, the behaviour of Abraham when he went into Egypt. He passed Sarah his wife off as his sister, for fear he might be killed if Pharaoh was pleased with her, and accepted lavish gifts from him in return for property rights in the pseudo-sister. Whereupon the Lord "plagued Pharaoh (who had acted obviously in all innocence) and his house with many plagues because of Sarah, Abraham's wife." Very justly Pharaoh remarked to Abraham, "Why didst thou not tell me she was thy wife? Why saidst thou, She is my sister? now, therefore, behold thy wife, take her and go and they sent him away, and his wife,

thy way

and all that he had." Mind you, he goes off, he who had come to Egypt driven by famine, "very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold," the profits of the prostitution of his wife; and when he comes to his altar at Bethel he calls upon the name of the Lord, and the Lord, his confederate in this spoiling of the Egyptians, has not the tiniest word. of reproof for him!

Moses, the exalted leader of the nation, the law-giver, the mouthpiece of the Lord, is credited with super-Prussian standards of waging war. In Numbers 31 he sends out his captains, at the instance of the Lord, to fight the Midianites. After waging a bloody war of extermination, "they brought the captives and the prey, and the spoil unto Moses and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host and Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? Behold these caused the children of Israel to commit trespass against the Lord

and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." Later on in the chapter, "The Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Take the sum of the prey that was taken, both of man and of beast and divide the prey into two parts and levy a tribute unto the Lord soul in five hundred, both of the persons, and of the beeves, and of the asses, and of the sheep." The number of the virgins so disposed of is given as thirty-two thousand, which is probably a lustful exaggeration.

one

In Second Kings is told the story of the infamous pogrom carried out by Jehu, at the instance of Jehovah, upon the children of Ahab. Treachery and blood soil every incident of it, yet "the Lord said unto Jehu, Because thou hast done well in executing that which is right in mine eyes, and hast done unto the house of Ahab according to all that was in mine heart, thy children of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel."

It is customary to refer this horrible punishment visited upon the seed of Ahab to the murder of Naboth, who was stoned to death on a charge of blasphemy, trumped up by Ahab's wife, Jezebel, in order that her husband might get possession of Naboth's vineyard. If that was the true cause,

it appears, from a comparison of the punishment meted out to David for the murder of Uriah, that a vineyard was of very much more importance in the eyes of the Lord than

a woman.

When Jehu was commissioned to exterminate the clan Ahab no specific mention was made of Naboth, but the reason given was the avenging of "the blood of my servants and prophets," whose shedding was attributed to Jezebel. But it was presumably to offset the slaughter of these prophets that Elijah and his followers killed all the priests of Baal. A very important point must be considered here. When the Israelites conquered Canaan they took over the shrines of the natives (witness a delightful story in Judges 17 and 18), and also some of their modes of worship. The gods of the Canaanites were called baals, or lords of the land; and it naturally came to pass that the title Baal was applied to Jehovah, and that he was worshipped quite as sincerely under the one name as under the other. The Canaanitish influence undoubtedly strengthened the orgiastic character of the worship of Jehovah, retarding the development of religious ideals, and therefore came under the ban of the more spiritually-minded of the people; but what is denounced by the writers of the historical books was not a distinct, heathenish cult: it was rather the popular, ritualistic form of the national religion. Perhaps it is not an entirely unfair comparison to recall the fashion in which the pioneers of the Protestant Church condemned Catholicism as idolatry, and personified it as the Scarlet Woman.

Ahab's punishment, therefore, was for being wrong in the form in which he chose to worship Jehovah, a form certainly very gross and licentious, but still one which was not below the average of the religious customs of the day. His savagery in support of his chosen ritual had been fought with equal savagery by Elijah. The brutal character of the punishment is the more amazing when one reads, immediately after the Lord's commendation of Jehu for executing it, that Jehu "took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord God of Israel with all his heart; for he departed not from the sins of Jereboam, which made Israel to sin." These sins of Jereboam consisted precisely in the country shrine worship for the support of which Ahab's seed was exterminated.

The only reasonable explanation of the whole affair lies

in the fact, established by historical criticism, that the later prophets, who were fighting hard for the purification of the worship of Jehovah by the elimination of the country shrines and the ritual, wrote these records with the intention of making out a strong case for their reform. Their inconsistent brutality is chargeable to the chronicler's conception of a tribal god with human passions; and we who have the many persecutions of the Christian Church behind us, who know what the prophets of more enlightened civilizations have sanctioned in God's name, can only agree that God is not to be judged by the deeds of all who call him Lord.

Those who still insist that the Old Testament records are without exception inspired revelations for the guidance of twentieth century morality can say absolutely nothing today against the arrogation by the former Kaiser of the approval and support of God. The Hebrew kings who believed themselves anointed of God, even as the Hohenzollern believed himself to be, claimed, as he claimed, the sanction of God for the breaking of treaties, the looting and burning of captured cities, the murder of non-combatants, the rape of women and children, and their transportation to work in the fields of their conquerors.

Having been thus convinced by the evidence of one's eyes that this Jehovah of the Jews is not the God of love and justice one has been taught to revere, one is naturally curious to learn how the Hebrew conception of the deity was evolved. Old Testament scholars have traced it back through the Mosaic tradition to an ancient Semitic god. In the same chapter of Exodus which tells the familiar story of the bulrushes, the scribe writes that Moses, fleeing from Egypt, came to the land of Midian, which was in Asia, on the borders of the Red Sea. "And he sat down by a well. Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters; and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father's flock. And the shepherds came and drove them away; but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock. And when they came to Jethro their father, he said, How is it that ye are come so soon today? And they said, An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and also drew water enough for us, and watered the flock. And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? why is it that ye have left the man? call him,