Now, from the hard simplicity of nature in the Semitic region, or from the simplicity of life and thought resulting from it, or from the early apprehension by that part of the human family of the idea of a Creator, or from other causes not yet made out (though, indeed, it is the fact, and not the cause, that we are now concerned with), there has always been a disposition in the Semitic mind to think of God as one. In the earliest indications we possess of their religious thought each tribe, each city, almost each family, appears to have had its own God. They never could have created, or accepted, a Pantheon. The idea of Polytheism was unnatural, illogical, repulsive to them. The inference, therefore, is that in the large hierarchy of heaven, which approved itself to the Egyptian mind, there could be nothing Semitic. The religion, the religious thought of Egypt, which so stirred the whole heart, and swayed the whole being of the people as to impel them to raise to the glory of their gods the grandest temples the world has ever seen, was, in its whole cast and character, an abomination to the Semite. Next after Religion, the most important effort of the human mind is Law. Law is distinguishable from Religion. It is not an effort to embrace and interpret the whole, but a general and enforced application of some of the conclusions of that interpretation to the regulation of the conduct of men towards each other. Its principles are those of justice and expediency, but with very considerable limitations—not absolute justice, but justice as then and there understood; and not in every point and particular, but in those matters only in which evidence is possible, and the observance also of which can be enforced by penalties; nor absolute expediency, but again, as it is then and there understood, and limited to such matters as admit of being carried out, and enforced, by public authority. This, it is plain, may be regarded—and as a matter of observation and history is still, and has in all times been, regarded—either as something distinct from, or as a department of, religion. If treated as a part of religion, then either the very letter itself of the law, or else the principles on which it is founded, and of which it is an application, must be accepted as from God. In the former case God is regarded as the actual legislator, and sometimes going a step further, as the actual executor of His own law. In the latter case He is regarded, because He is the primary source, at all events, of its principles, as ultimately their guardian, and the avenger of their violation.