In the oldest traditions of Hebraism, God speaks to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, as one man speaks to another, by articulate sounds perceived by the ear. The sacred formula, _Thus saith the Lord_, serves as the uniform introduction to civil, political, and ritual, as well as to moral and religious, laws. Religion then embraced and regulated all the life. The great empires of antiquity all claim a divine origin. As to ancient legislations, there is not one that is not said to have come from heaven. The Egyptians refer theirs to the god Thoth or Hermes; Minos, in Crete, is said to have received his laws from Jupiter; Lycurgus, in Sparta, from Apollo; Zoroaster, in Persia, from Ahura Mazda; Numa Pompilius, at Rome, from the nymph Egeria. Moses does not stand alone. I am not here comparing the value of the things; I am simply pointing out the identity of the representations. Nor was it only religious and political institutions that they referred to the will of the gods; they referred to it all kinds of decisions and enterprises; declarations of war, raids to make, the order of battle, the extermination of the vanquished, the sharing of the spoils, conditions of peace, expiations to be made; everything was done in obedience to supernatural orders the authenticity of which no one thought of discussing. In the same way, a divine inspiration explained the gift of predicting the future, the eloquence of orators, the sagacity of statesmen, the genius of great soldiers, the verve of poets, and even the skill of the more famous artisans. "Legends!" it is said. No doubt. But these legends are universal. Men speak everywhere the same language, because everywhere they think in the same fashion. A great progress, however, is accomplished in Israel. The notion of revelation gradually becomes interior and moral. Among the prophets, revelation is conceived of as the action of the Spirit of Jehovah entering and acting in the spirit of man. It is true that the mythical conception still persists and betrays itself in this: divine inspiration is represented as the invasion of a human being by another being alien to him,--as a sort of mental alienation or possession. The divine Spirit is represented as a force which comes from without, a wind from above which no one can resist, of which the elect are as much the victims as the organs. Its action is measured by the agitation and commotion of the inspired, by the disorder of their faculties, by the incoherence of their gestures and their speech. The delirium of man becomes the sign of the presence of God. Madmen, valetudinarians, epileptics, are regarded almost everywhere as the favourites of Heaven. Their strange words or acts men believe to be divine oracles delivered unconsciously and against the will.