The salient point in the Old Testament is the relation of God with His people, an alliance or covenant between Jehovah and Israel of which the rainbow became the first type. Threatenings and promises enforced the keeping of the moral law, the good and evil things of this life; if Israel obeyed the Lord and kept His commandments, the fields would yield their crops, the trees their fruits, and peace would reign in the land; if they were disobedient, the heaven would become brass, and famine and pestilence would decimate the people, and the rest would be led captive by foreign kings. Although no definite assertion concerning the immortality of the soul may be found in the Old Testament, a belief in personal immortality is taken for granted in several passages, and mention is frequently made of an abode in which the spirits remain after their separation from the body, that is Sheol, in which joy and suffering are equally unknown. The picture drawn by David in some of the Psalms, of the abode of the departed is sad and desolate. Though the word is not meant for an individual grave, this idea may have been borrowed from it; the meaning is that of a vast space in the interior of the earth; the dead lie down and are together and at rest, but separated not only from man but also from God. The Hebrews naturally mourned and compassionated their dead most sincerely. “Alas my father, alas my mother, my poor children.” But why should we Aryans, whose language is not allied philologically with the Semitic, copy their phrases? Why should we Christians, who are not linked to them by dogma, allow ourselves to use the same hopeless expressions, instead of words instinct with life and hope? ON THE PROPHETS (NĀBHĪ) The phenomenon of prophecy, one of the earlier developments of the human mind, has been found amongst all peoples, at one time or other of their history. Certain spontaneous psychical movements dominated men. The important rôle played by the oracles in the history of Greece, is well known; the Greeks classed both the priests who interpreted the auguries, and those persons who considered themselves inspired by the gods and claimed a knowledge of hidden things, under the name of prophets, indifferently. In the third century B.C. the Jews of Alexandria, when writing the Septuagint, translated the Hebrew word _Nābhī_ by prophet. As amongst Hebraists the word Nābhī does not necessarily imply the power of foretelling the future, whilst the word prophet conveys that meaning, it might have been well to employ both terms. The original meaning of the word Nābhī seems to have been “agitated outbursts.” These men seem to have passed through a phase of nervous exaltation before beginning their exhortations; when once they had started their outpourings they no longer had control over their spirit’s impulse; and were often physically prostrated, showing signs of an overpowering compelling physical force, divinely irresistible.