The inclination must be resisted to dispose of this mysterious ordinance as a mere sanitary measure. It was a sanitary measure, but it was much besides. The Jews believed that every animal had a soul, a spirit, which was beyond human jurisdiction, with which they had no right to tamper. When we ask, however, what this soul, this spirit, was, we find ourselves groping in the dark. Was it material, as the soul was thought to be by the Egyptians and by the earliest doctors of the Christian Church? Was it an immaterial, impersonal, Divine essence? Was its identity permanent, or temporary? We can give no decisive answer; but we may assume with considerable certainty that life, spirit, whatever it was, appeared at least to the majority of the Jews to possess one nature, whether in men or in animals. When a Jew denied the immortality of the soul, he denied it both for man and for beast. “I said in my heart,” wrote the author of Ecclesiastes, “concerning the estate of the sons of men that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth so the other dieth; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast.” The mist which surrounds the Hebrew idea of the soul may proceed from the fact that they did not know themselves what they meant by it, or from the fact that they once knew what they meant by it so well as to render elucidation superfluous. If the teraphim represented the Lares or family dead, then the archaic Jewish idea of the soul was simple and definite. It is possible that in all later times two diametrically opposed opinions existed contemporaneously, as was the case with the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Jewish people did not feel the pressing need to dogmatise about the soul that other peoples have felt; they had one living soul which was immortal, and its name was Israel! Still, through all ages, from the earliest times till now, the Jews have continued to hold sacred “the blood which is the life.” In Hindu religious books, where similar ordinances are enforced, there are hints of a suspicion which, as I have said elsewhere, could not have been absent from the minds of Hebrew legislators—the haunting suspicion of a possible mixing-up of personality. Here we tread on the skirts of magic: a subject which belongs to starless nights.