The Lady of Girdles was worshipped there not by men and women only, but by girls with girls; by others too, not in couples, but singly, girls who in their solitary devotions had instruments for aid.[36] Religion, as yet, had but the slightest connection with morality, a circumstance explicable perhaps by the fact that it resumed the ethnical conscience of a race. Between the altar of El Shaddai and the shrines of other gods there were many differences, of which geography was the least. Jahveh, from a tutelary god, had indeed become the national divinity of a chosen people. But the Moabites were the chosen people of Chemos; the Ammonites were the chosen people of Rimmon; the Babylonians were the chosen people of Bel. The title conferred no distinction. As a consequence, to differentiate Jahveh from all other gods, and Israel from all other people, to make the one unique and the other pontiff and shepherd of the nations of the world, became the dream of anonymous poets, one that prophets, sometimes equally anonymous, proclaimed. It was the prophets that reviled the false gods, denounced the abominations of Ishtar, and purified the Israelite heart. While nothing discernible, or even imaginable, menaced, however slightly, the great empires of that day, the prophets were the first to realize that the Orient was dead. When the Christ announced that the end of the world was at hand, he but reiterated anterior predictions that presently were fulfilled. A world did end. That of antiquity ceased to be. [Footnote 36: _Cf._ Deut. xxiii. 17, where _'alamoth_ (puellae) is rendered in the Sapphist sense. Ezekiel xvi. 17. _Fecisti tibi imagines masculinas._] It was the prophets that foretold it. Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and, it may be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius which itself, while madness, is a madness wholly divine, they heralded the future, they established the past. Abraham they drew from allegory, Moses from myth. They made them live, and so immortally that one survives in Islam, the other in words that are a law of grace for all. If, in visions possibly ecstatic, they beheld heights that lost themselves in immensity, and saw there an ineffable name seared by forked flames on a tablet of stone; if that spectacle and the theophany of it were but poetry, the decalogue is a fact, one so solid that though ages have gone, though empires have crumbled, though the customs of man have altered, though the sky itself have changed, still is obeyed the commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.