natural and even physical way. It is therefore no longer a covenant relation, which depends on the observance of moral obligations, but one of nature which cannot be broken by either party. Naturally the sanctuaries of the Canaanites are taken over by the Israelites, and Jehovah is worshipped in "the high places." All through the history worship at these local sanctuaries is condemned, but only from a later standpoint, for the earliest Book of Laws permitted an altar to be erected anywhere where Jehovah had manifested Himself (Exod. xx. 24). Around some of these undoubtedly Canaanitish sanctuaries the stories of the Patriarchs gathered, but from the practices which prevailed at such places as Bethel we can see that heathen rites were used, for here Jeroboam set up the golden calves, which seem to have been used in the worship of Jehovah, for neither Elijah nor Amos condemns them. Jehovah is now worshipped all over the land, but there is the same tendency to regard each separate place as having its local deity, and so Jehovah is multiplied (perhaps, Jer. xi. 13) and needs to be further identified by the addition of place names, as in the strange name El-bethel (Gen. xxxv. 7), El-elohe-Israel (Gen. xxxiii. 20), in a way that is very like the multiplication of the Baalim. So deeply was the worship of Jehovah mixed up with Canaanitish ideas that in the reign of Josiah the only possibility of reform lay in forbidding the worship at the local sanctuaries altogether and concentrating all worship at the central sanctuary of Jerusalem. Nothing but this process of syncretism can explain the condition of religion in the subsequent history, and it is needed to enable us to understand both the difficulty of the work of the Prophets and the form their message takes.