_Third_, The One People. Save for possible proselytes from the neighbouring heathen, Israel is alone legislated for—a free nation owning no foreign king as it bows to no foreign deity, but governing itself in obedience to the revealed Will of its own God. This Will is applied to every detail of its life in as comprehensive a system of national religion as the world has known. And thus next to devotion to the Deity comes pride in the nation. Because of their possession of the Divine Law Israel are _the_ righteous people and wise above all others. The patriotism of the Book must have been one cause of its immediate acceptance by the people, when Josiah brought it before them and upon it they made Covenant with their God. Throughout the Book treats the nation as a moral unit. It enforces indeed justice as between man and man. It gives woman a higher position than is assumed for her by other Hebrew codes. It cares for the individual poor, stranger, debtor and dependent priest with a humanity all its own, and it exhorts to the education of children. Above all it forbids base thoughts as well as base deeds. Yet, while thus enforcing the elements of a searching personal morality, Deuteronomy deals with the individual only through his relations to the nation and the national worship. The Book has no promise for the individual beyond the grave. Nor is there pity nor charity for other peoples nor any sense of a place for them in the Divine Providence. There is no missionary spirit nor hope for mankind outside of Israel. Further it is due to the almost exclusively national outlook and interest of the Book that it has no guidance or comfort to offer for another element of personal experience—question and doubt. While it illustrates from the nation’s history the purifying discipline of suffering because of sin it says nothing of the sufferings of righteous individuals, but by the absoluteness of its doctrines of morality and Providence suggests, if indeed it does not inculcate, the dogma that right-doing will always meet with prosperity and wrong-doing with pain and disaster—a dogma which provoked the thoughtful to scepticism, as we shall see with Jeremiah himself. Again, the fact that the Book, while superbly insistent upon justice, holiness and humanity, lays equal emphasis on a definite ritual, with One Altar and an exclusive system of sacrifices, tempted the popular mind to a superstitious confidence in these institutions. And while it was of practical advantage to have the principles of the prophets reduced to a written system, which could be enforced as public law and taught to the young—two ends on which the authors of Deuteronomy are earnestly bent—there was danger of the people coming thereby to trust rather in the letter than in the spirit of the new revelation. Both these dangers were soon realised. As Dr. A. B. Davidson has said, “Pharisæism and Deuteronomy came into the world on the same day.” * * * * *