But, on the whole, the charm of mythology prevailed among the Aryan nations, and a return to the primitive intuition of God and a total negation of all gods, wore rendered more difficult to the Aryan than to the Semitic man. The Semitic man had hardly ever to resist the allurements of mythology. The names with which he invoked the Deity did not trick him by their equivocal character. Nevertheless, these Semitic names, too, though predicative in the beginning, became subjective, and from being the various names of One Being, lapsed into names of various beings. Hence arose a danger which threatened well-nigh to bar to the Semitic race the approach to the conception and worship of the One God. Nowhere can we see this danger more clearly than in the history of the Jews. The Jews had, no doubt, preserved, from the beginning the idea of God, and their names of God contained nothing but what might by right be ascribed to Him. They worshipped a single God, and, whenever they fell into idolatry, they felt that they had fallen away from God. But that God, under whatever name they invoked Him, was especially their God, their own national God, and His existence did not exclude the existence of other gods or demons. Of the ancestors of Abraham and Nachor, even of their father Terah, we know that in old time, when they dwelt on the other side of the flood, they served other gods (Joshua xxiv. 2). At the time of Joshua these gods were not yet forgotten, and instead of denying their existence altogether, Joshua only exhorts the people to put away the gods which their fathers served on the other side of the flood and in Egypt, and to serve the Lord: 'Choose ye this day,' he says, 'whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers 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.'