The learned classes are apt to approach a problem in its most difficult form. Out of travellers’ tales about man in the South Sea Islands, the sociologist evolves a theory of religion. Take up a book on the natural history of religion and you will find enough learned citations about the Hurons and the Esquimaux and the Thibet tribes to furnish the library of Pantagruel. Now the regard of a savage for his idol is a very obscure question of psychology. Ten years of youth spent among a tribe would not be too long a period in which to lay the foundations for an intelligent guess at the facts, let alone their significance. Meanwhile, the actual genealogy of our own religious feelings is neglected as too familiar. Yet the spiritual history of that race which gave Europe many of its religions, is better known than any other history of a like antiquity. The point of view and feeling about life which has given us our own experience of religion was developed in the Jew. The Old Testament is the place in which to study the growth and meaning of the only religious feeling that we are sure we understand. The history of the Jews is the history of a single overpowering emotion which appears in its two forms,--so identical in content that you may often find them both in the same sentence, both in the same verse of Isaiah or Psalm of David,--prostration before the Lord of Hosts, compassion for the poor and the oppressed. This passion of altruism which gave the prophets their terrible power is the legacy of the Jew to the world. The emotion of self-abasement and self-sacrifice and the emotion of love towards others, are one thing. This, in its lower forms, leads to self-mutilation and incantations; in its higher forms, it becomes embodied by the prophetic fury of great poets into the idea of a Messiah who shall be both savior and sacrifice. There is only one passion at work in all these great protagonists of human nature, in Nathan, Elijah, Jeremiah and in the innumerable prophets who confronted the arbitrary power of the kings. These men stood for righteousness and showed an intensity of moral courage which nothing but compassion has ever engendered, and nothing but faith has ever expressed. The rags and the self surrender, the purity and the power, the belief that they spoke not of themselves but for the Lord, have been the same in all ages. It is impossible to feel compassion in this degree and not express it in this manner. All just anger is compassion. The terrible wrath of these men is as comprehensible as their hymns or their triumph. There is no child that reads Isaiah whose nature does not respond to him, because the course of feeling in him is true to life. Between the Old Testament and the New we see a perfectly coherent development of the same passion of the same race into its higher kind. Both forms of it have changed. In the New Testament the love has become specialized into that particular and especial regard for the