Again, we are not called upon to maintain in this lecture the chronological exactness or the historical faithfulness of the sacred annals of Israel; all that is asserted is that in them we have as faithful a mirror of the ages which they profess to reflect as we have in the Indian. The characters in the scenes which they produce are neither puppets nor shadows, but very living and substantial realities. The personages at least are men whose idiosyncrasies are sharply but naturally defined, and whose speech, and manners, and conduct, and beliefs, accord wonderfully well with the places and the periods in which they meet us. We have to examine the Hebrew annals however, not to verify the details of ancient transactions which they record, but simply to ascertain the beliefs which they contain and illustrate. The truth or the error of these beliefs we need not discuss, for the beliefs themselves are facts of great importance, and so are the consequences that flowed from them; and when we compare these beliefs with those which we have been considering, we will find a development parallel indeed, but of an entirely different class of ideas or religious thoughts. In the Rig-Veda we have reflected the immigration of a higher race into what has been called the Holy Land of India. The Rig-Veda dates from about the times of the Exodus or the invasion of the Holy Land of Palestine. The Hebrew traditions, like the Indian, tell of an earlier immigration of their fathers into the same Palestine some five centuries previous. When we examine the narratives in which this earlier immigration is recorded, we find the patriarchs moving along among similar conditions, but representing a much higher level of religious thought than the Aryans when they reached the Ganges. Though everywhere living among nature-worshippers, and though showing the taint of that worship in their own conduct, their religion is neither that of physiolatry nor idolatry.[105] Abraham was not a polytheist; he came out of Ur of the Chaldees—whether that be a designation of a geographical region or a description of a religious state—not as one who trembled before the forces of Nature, afraid to inquire what they meant or whence they came; not as one who had discovered behind them the Infinite Self, out of which, because of ignorance or illusion, he and they had emanated, but as a man who believed in a Personal Deity who had created and continued to control them, and who, though El-Elion and Shaddai, yet watched over and communicated with Abraham as his best of friends. We need not ascribe to the patriarch an intelligence which he did not possess. God may have been in his thought too much the almighty Protector of himself and of his descendants—for in that age the family of the chief would be all-important, and the idea even of the nation had not yet germinated,—but that he apprehended God under a strictly moral aspect is vouched for by his life, as the founder of a new epoch to