No reader of the Old Testament can fail to have been struck by the singularly credulous fickleness of the Jewish mind. Although claiming the title of the specially selected people of Jehovah, the Israelites exhibited a constant and inveterate tendency to forsake his service for the worship of other gods. The mighty "signs and wonders" which God is represented as incessantly working {100} on their behalf, and in their sight, had apparently no effect upon them. The miraculous even then had, as it would seem, already lost all novelty, and ceased, according to the records, to excite more than mere passing astonishment. The leaders and prophets of Israel had a perpetual struggle to restrain the people from "following after" heathen deities, and whilst the burden of the Prophets is one grand denunciation of the idolatry into which the nation was incessantly falling, the verdict of the historical books upon the several kings and rulers of Israel proves how common it was, and how rare even the nominal service of Jehovah. At the best the mind of the Jewish nation only after long and slow progression, attained the idea of a perfect monotheism, but added to the belief in Jehovah the recognition of a host of other gods, over whom it merely gave him supremacy.(1) This is apparent even in the first commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me;" and the necessity for such a law received its illustration from a people who are represented as actually worshipping the golden calf, made for them by the complaisant Aaron, during the very time that the great Decalogue was being written on the Mount by his colleague Moses.(2) It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that, at a later period, and throughout patristic days, the gods of the Greeks and other heathen nations were so far gently treated, that, although repudiated as Deities, {101}