"Who was this 'Melchom,' you ask, who had taken possession of the country of God? A pleasant sort of god, certainly, whom the God of Jeremiah would carry off to be dragged into captivity." Ah, M. l'Abbé! you are quite smart and lively. You ask, who is this Melchom? I will immediately inform you. Melek or Melkom signified the Lord, as did Adoni or Adonai, Baal or Bel, Adad or Shadai, Eloi or Eloa. Almost all the nations of Syria gave such names to their gods; each had its lord, its protector, its god. Even the name of Jehovah was a Phoenician and proper name; this we learn from Sanchoniathon, who was certainly anterior to Moses; and also from Diodorus. We well know that God is equally the God, the absolute master, of Egyptians and Jews, of all men and all worlds; but it is not in this light that he is represented when Moses appears before Pharaoh. He never speaks to that monarch but in the name of the God of the Hebrews, as an ambassador delivers the orders of the king his master. He speaks so little in the name of the Master of all Nature, that Pharaoh replies to him, "I do not know him." Moses performs prodigies in the name of this God; but the magicians of Pharaoh perform precisely the same prodigies in the name of their own. Hitherto both sides are equal; the contest is, who shall be deemed most powerful, not who shall be deemed alone powerful. At length, the God of the Hebrews decidedly carries the day; he manifests a power by far the greater; but not the only power. Thus, speaking after the manner of men, Pharaoh's incredulity is very excusable. It is the same incredulity as Montezuma exhibited before Cortes, and Atahualpa before the Pizarros. When Joshua called together the Jews, he said to them: "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve, whether the gods which your father served, that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land ye dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." The people, therefore, had already given themselves up to other gods, and might serve whom they pleased. When the family of Micah, in Ephraim, hire a Levitical priest to conduct the service of a strange god, when the whole tribe of Dan serve the same god as the family of Micah; when a grandson of Moses himself becomes a hired priest of the same god--no one murmurs; every one has his own god, undisturbed; and the grandson of Moses becomes an idolater without any one's reviling or accusing him. At that time, therefore, every one chose his own local god, his own protector. The same Jews, after the death of Gideon, adore Baal-berith, which means precisely the same as Adonai--the lord, the protector; they change their protector. Adonai, in the time of Joshua, becomes master of the mountains; but he is unable to overcome the inhabitants of the valleys, because they had chariots armed with scythes. Can anything more correctly represent the idea of a local deity, a god who is strong in one place, but not so in another?