It is necessary, however, to use names as soon as we possess the ideas. All those which have contributed to the education of humanity have been the production of an impersonal work, the result of a long meditation by the human mind. It has been said that the idea and name of “the Being” for God, originated in the mind of Moses; perhaps this prophet put the last touch. “I Am that I Am” was the name used by him for the Eternal. The Hebrews employed another method when speaking of God, they used the word Il or El. In Hebrew it occurs both in its general sense of strong or hero, and as a name of God. Something equivalent is found in the Zend-Avesta; “Looking around him, Il (Ahuramazda, the Zend name for Ormazd) sees nothing but himself; and Il said, ‘I Am,’ and his name became ‘I Am.’” But man at times yearns for a closer union with God than is expressed by the name “Being.” When troubled and in pain he says, “My Father!” and he remembers the names which he lisped as a child, and all come crowding to his lips; and He who is above all hears and understands. We must not separate religion from philosophy; the subjects touching on religion have always been those which have given birth to philosophy; even if religion existed only on sentiment, as some people maintain, it would be for philosophy to determine if this sentiment were an illusion, or if it had a rational base; to separate them is to lessen both. FOOTNOTES: [109] _Origin and Growth of Religion_, p. 312. [110] Rothe in his “Stille Stunden,” _Anthropological Religion_, p. 16. [111] Psalm xxxiii. 6; Isaiah xi. 4. [112] _Natural Religion_, p. 164. [113] _Rig-Veda_, I. 164. 6. [114] _Ibid_., VI. 9. 6. [115] _Rig-Veda_, X. 82. 7. [116] _Ibid._, 121. 8. [117] _Theosophy or Psychological Religion_, p. 97. [118] Higher Critics. [119] We find from a letter of St Jerome’s to Paula that he was in the habit of advising his disciples to read the Scriptures, which he so reverenced, in the following order. He began by the Psalms, then took the books of Solomon, then he would come to Job. After going through this course of Old Testament history he would come to the Gospels and then to the Acts and the Epistles. After this preparation he would turn to the Prophets, who had foretold all that the Gospels related, and ended by allowing his disciples to read the historical Books of the Old Testament, which might, he thought, without such previous training, trouble and perplex them.--TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. [120] From M. Renan’s work on Semitic languages. [121] _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, pp. 31, 32. [122] 2 Kings iii. 15. [123] Ezekiel xxxi. 8. [124] “A God understood would be no God at all.”--Dean Mansel, seventeenth century. [125] _Metaphysics_, xii. [126] _Physical Religion_, p. 4. [127] Cf. _Summum jus est summa injuria_.