The answer, I believe, to this pregnant question is partly to be found in a certain general tendency of the Semitic mind; partly in the peculiar political and social state of the Israelitish tribes during the ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries before the Christian era. Or, to put the proposed solution of the problem, beforehand, in a still simpler form, Hebrew monotheism was to some extent the result of a syncretic treatment of all the gods, in the course of which the attributes and characters of each became merged in the other, only the names (if anything) remaining distinct; and to some extent the result of the intense national patriotism, of which the ethnical god Jahweh was at once the outcome, the expression, and the fondest hope. The belief that Jahweh fought for Israel, {205}and that by trust in Jahweh alone could Israel hold her own against Egypt and Assyria, wildly fanatical as it appears to us to-day, and utterly disproved by all the facts of the case as it ultimately was, nevertheless formed a central idea of the Hebrew patriots, and resulted by slow degrees in the firm establishment first of an exclusive, and afterwards of a truly monotheistic Jahweh-cult. It is one of Ernest Renan’s brilliant paradoxes that the Semitic mind is naturally monotheistic. As a matter of fact, the Semitic mind has shown this native tendency in its first stages by everywhere evolving pretty much the same polytheistic pantheon as that evolved by every other group of human beings everywhere. Nevertheless, there is perhaps this kernel of truth in Renan’s paradoxical contention; the Semites, more readily than most other people, merge the features of their deities one in the other. That is not, indeed, by any means an exclusive Semitic trait. We saw already, in dealing with the Egyptian religion, how all the forms and functions of the gods faded at last into an inextricable mixture, an olla podrida of divinity, from which it was practically impossible to disentangle with certainty the original personalities of Ra and Turn, of Amen and Osiris, of Neith and Isis, of Ptah and Apis. Even in the relatively fixed and individualised pantheon of Hellas, it occurs often enough that confusions both of person and prerogative obscure the distinctness of the various gods. Aphrodite and Herakles are polymorphic in their embodiments. But in the Semitic religions, at least in that later stage where we first come across them, the lineaments of the different deities are so blurred and indefinite that hardly anything more than mere names can with certainty be recognised. No other gods are so shadowy and so vague. The type of this pantheon is that dim figure of El-Shaddai, the early and terrible object of Hebrew worship, of whose attributes and nature we know positively nothing, but who stands in the background of all Hebrew thought as the embodiment of the nameless {206}and trembling dread begotten on man’s soul by the irresistible