The transition from polytheism to monotheism was only made in Palestine and in the tradition of the Hebrews. There were two reasons for this, both of which bear witness to the divine vocation of that people: its religious predispositions and the powerful action of its prophets, of those men of God raised up in it from Moses to Christ. The desert is not monotheistic, as M. Renan was pleased at first to say, nor are nomads, shepherds, or freebooters nearer to the only God than sedentary and agricultural peoples. But, owing to the special turn of mind of the Hebrew family, its primitive polytheism, of which the plural, _elohim_, still reminds us, had an abstract character, and was reduced to a sort of anonymous plurality from which no divine genealogy could spring. All these elementary spirits, these _elohim_ of the air, the earth, the waters, were so similar to each other that the thought of the Semite never succeeded in discerning and discriminating them. They entered into one another, and ended by forming a sort of collective and abstract power, analagous to that which is represented in our language by the word "divinity." Add to this that, by the idea of holiness, Jehovah, the national _elohim_, was equally separated from Nature, and that, gradually divested of all corporeal form, He was predestined to become the God of conscience, the invisible Creator of all things, the Judge and the rewarder of all human actions. Neither these original predispositions, however, nor these general causes, account for the marvellous progress of the religion of Israel. The faith of the prophets is a creation of the moral order; it is the work of individual consciousnesses, of the religious heroes whom the divine Spirit raised up in succession for more than a thousand years. We shall explain elsewhere this heroic and age-long struggle of the prophets of Jehovah against the customs, the tendencies, and even the temperament of their people. Suffice it here to indicate the constant direction of their efforts, the precision and the fixedness of their ideal, the power of the common inspiration that animated them, the vigorous and vivacious feeling in each one of them that makes their work divine and carries them beyond their individual thoughts and hopes. Like us they laboured on an infinitely vaster plane than they conceived.