It was then as it is now--every man talks about that which is uppermost in his mind; he makes his comparisons with those things he is most familiar with; his illustrations are drawn from those objects he sees most frequently; his language never extends beyond the number of words at his command; his memory is only equal to the number of things he has stored away; his mind is made up or composed of those ideas that he has gathered from the experience of his senses; his ideas from the number of objects he has come in contact with; his knowledge consists of that which he has learned; his thoughts and reflections extend to that which he knows and never beyond; his understanding depends on all these; and comparatively speaking, few men are in advance of the age in which they live. Ideas, like other things terrestrial, have their birth, growth, development, maturity, and decline, and finally they partially or wholly disappear. The birth of the idea of God, without the various objective representations, had its origin in the mind of man; Abraham being the first, or supposed to be the first, man who conceived the notion that these images, idols, were not the proper thing. He doubted the quality of the gods, and the principal objection to these idols was that they had ears that did not hear, eyes that could not see, etc., etc., but the new God, the later Jehova, could. The strangest of all inconsistencies lies in the fact that while they endowed him with the human faculties, passions, emotions, desires, and feelings, there is nothing tangible about his body. Nothing was accomplished with this God during several centuries in Egypt. Moses brought his Jehova out--as a stern reality. He skillfully manipulated the idea. His own intellect and experience, his force and character, were concentrated in this Jehova. His masterly organization, his discipline, his impressive sternness, imperative and imperial, his stupendous will power, left a lasting impress upon this people during the four centuries. This idea was nursed, nourished, and sustained by the Levites, and when they found their influence was waning they established a concentrated form of government by selecting a sanhedrin or council of seventy and electing the most eligible person they could find on the recommendation of Samuel as their king. This king was Saul, whose reign, fortunately or unfortunately, did not last very long. Competition and struggle with other nations had, if anything, an educational tendency. As they grew numerically stronger, jealousies arose. Ambitious men were grasping for power, and contending faction naturally was the result. The story about the lost asses is like that about another ass we have heard of, that saw the angel and talked--we have many such, even at the present day. These stories are excellent fabrications to entertain juveniles with. And people must be precious asses to believe this nonsense, that God would be such an ass as to interfere with these asses.