We cannot believe that M. Renan would be satisfied with the admission that there had been among the Jews a few leading men who believed in one God, or that the existence of but one God was an article of faith not quite unknown among the other Semitic races; yet he has hardly proved more. He has collected, with great learning and ingenuity, all traces of monotheism in the annals of the Semitic nations; but he has taken no pains to discover the traces of polytheism, whether faint or distinct, which are disclosed in the same annals. In acting the part of an advocate he has for a time divested himself of the nobler character of the historian. If M. Renan had looked with equal zeal for the scattered vestiges both of a monotheistic and of a polytheistic worship, he would have drawn, perhaps, a less striking, but we believe a more faithful, portrait of the Semitic man. We may accept all the facts of M. Renan, for his facts are almost always to be trusted; but we cannot accept his conclusions, because they would be in contradiction to other facts which M. Renan places too much in the background, or ignores altogether. Besides, there is something in the very conclusions to which he is driven by his too partial evidence which jars on our ears, and betrays a want of harmony in the premises on which he builds. Taking his stand on the fact that the Jewish race was the first of all the nations of the world to arrive at the knowledge of one God, M. Renan proceeds to argue that, if their monotheism had been the result of a persevering mental effort--if it had been a discovery like the philosophical or scientific discoveries of the Greeks, it would be necessary to admit that the Jews surpassed all other nations of the world in intellect and vigour of speculation. This, he admits, is contrary to fact: 'Apart la supériorité de son culte, le peuple juif n'en a aucune autre; c'est un des peuples les moins doués pour la science et la philosophie parmi les peuples de l'antiquité; il n'a une grande position ni politique ni militaire. Ses institutions sont purement conservatrices; les prophètes, qui représentent excellemment son génie, sont des hommes essentiellement réactionnaires, se reportant toujours vers un idéal antérieur. Comment expliquer, au sein d'une société aussi étroite et aussi peu développée, une révolution d'idées qu'Athènes et Alexandrie n'ont pas réussi à accomplir?' M. Renan then defines the monotheism of the Jews, and of the Semitic nations in general, as the result of a low, rather than of a high state of intellectual cultivation: 'Il s'en faut,' he writes (p. 40), 'que le monothéisme soit le produit d'une race qui a des idées exaltées en fait de religion; c'est en réalité le fruit d'une race qui a peu de besoins religieux. C'est comme _minimum_ de religion, en fait de dogmes et en fait de pratiques extérieures, que le monothéisme est surtout accommodé aux besoins des populations nomades.'