and ruthless forces of nature. This vagueness and shadowiness of the Semitic religious conceptions seems to depend to some extent upon the inartistic nature of the Semitic culture. The Semite seldom carved the image of his god. Roman observers noted with surprise that the shrine of Carmel contained no idol. But it depended also upon deep-seated characteristics of the Semitic race. Melancholy, contemplative, proud, reserved, but strangely fanciful, the Arab of to-day perhaps gives us the clue to the indefinite nature of early Semitic religious thinking. There never was anether world more ghostly than Sheol; there never were gods more dimly awful than the Elohim who float through the early stories of the Hebrew mystical cycle. Their very names are hardly known to us: they come to us through the veil of later Jehovistic editing with such merely descriptive titles as the God of Abraham, the Terror of Isaac, the Mighty Power, the Most High Deity. Indeed, the true Hebrew, like many other barbarians, seems to have shrunk either from looking upon the actual form of his god itself, or from pronouncing aloud his proper name. His deity was shrouded in the darkness of an ark or the deep gloom of an inner tent or sanctuary; the syllables that designated the object of his worship were never uttered in full, save on the most solemn occasions, but were shirked or slurred over by some descriptive epithet. Even the unpronounceable title of Jahweh itself appears from our documents to have been a later name bestowed during the Exodus on an antique god: while the rival titles of the Baal and the Molech mean nothing more than the Lord and the King respectively. An excessive reverence forbade the Semite to know anything of his god’s personal appearance or true name, and so left the features of almost all the gods equally uncertain and equally formless.