And yet this limited faith in Jehovah as the God of the Jews, as a God more powerful than the gods of the heathen, as a God above all gods, betrays itself again and again in the history of the Jews. The idea of many gods is there, and wherever that idea exists, wherever the plural of god is used in earnest, there is polytheism. It is not so much the names of Zeus, Hermes, &c., which constitute the polytheism of the Greeks; it is the plural θεοἱ, gods, which contains the fatal spell. We do not know what M. Renan means when he says that Jehovah with the Jews 'n'est pas le plus grand entre plusieurs dieux; c'est le Dieu unique.' It was so with Abraham, it was so after Jacob had been changed into Israel, it was so with Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah. But what is the meaning of the very first commandment, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me?' Could this command have been addressed to a nation to whom the plural of God was a nonentity? It might be answered that the plural of God was to the Jews as revolting as it is to us, that it was revolting to their faith, if not to their reason. But how was it that their language tolerated the plural of a word which excludes plurality as much as the word for the centre of a sphere? No man who had clearly perceived the unity of God, could say with the Psalmist (lxxxvi. 8), 'Among the gods there is none like unto Thee, O Lord, neither are there any works like unto Thy works.' Though the same poet says, 'Thou art God alone,' he could not have compared God with other gods, if his idea of God had really reached that all-embracing character which it had with Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah. Nor would God have been praised as the 'great king above all gods' by a poet in whose eyes the gods of the heathen had been recognised as what they were--mighty shadows, thrown by the mighty works of God, and intercepting for a time the pure light of the Godhead. We thus arrive at a different conviction from that which M. Renan has made the basis of the history of the Semitic race. We can see nothing that would justify the admission of a monotheistic instinct, granted to the Semitic, and withheld from the Aryan race. They both share in the primitive intuition of God, they are both exposed to dangers in framing names for God, and they both fall into polytheism. What is peculiar to the Aryan race is their mythological phraseology, superadded to their polytheism; what is peculiar to the Semitic race is their belief in a national god--in a god chosen by his people as his people had been chosen by him.