From the earliest conception of Jahveh as the Tribal God,—a conception which even Kuenen admits to be native to the race of Israel, and untraceable to any other people,—from this conception, which plainly assumed the existence of other and rival gods of neighboring nations, it was an enormous step in advance to pass to the idea of One only Lord of all the earth, whose House should be a “House of prayer for all nations.” Still vaster was the progress from anthropomorphic and morally imperfect ideas of the character of the tribal God to the adoration of Isaiah’s “High and Holy One, who inhabiteth eternity,” who dwells in the high and holy place with the pure in heart and the contrite. Again, there was made a bound forward by Judaism when the earlier simple secularism and disbelief of, or indifference to, a future world vanished before the belief in Immortality which grew up in spite of the teachings of Antigonus and Sadok, and (after the Dispersion) never faded out again altogether. And finally, with the development of the Prophetic spirit, Worship assumed more its true forms of praise, confession of sin, and thanksgiving; and, at the fall of Jerusalem, the bloody sacrifices (long limited to the sacred enclosure) came to an end forever amid the smoking ruins. These were truly great steps of progress made by Israel of old; but the last of them left the nation to carry into its sorrowful exile an intolerable burden of ceremonialism and dusty superstitions, whereof the Talmud is now the lumber-room, and possessed also by an unhappy demon of anti-social pride, which forbade it to extend to or accept from other nations the right hand of human brotherhood. The Jews did not go out from Jerusalem as the little band of Christian missionaries had gone, eager to scatter their new wealth of truth among the nations, and, though stoned and crucified by those whom they sought to bless, yet ever after by their children’s children to be revered and canonized. The Jews went out as misers of truth, holding their full bags of treasure hid in their breasts. Nor in the ages following the Dispersion, while Christianity diverged further and further from pure Theism, and through Mariolatry and Hagiolatry sank well-nigh to polytheism and idolatry, do we ever once hear of an attempt by any Jewish teacher, even by such a man as Maimonides, to call back the wandering nations by proclaiming in their ears the “schema Israel”—“THE LORD YOUR GOD THE ETERNAL IS ONE.” Before the expulsion from Palestine, for a brief period, Judaism (as one of its bitterest enemies has remarked) showed promise of becoming a proselytizing creed, “when, under the influence of Greek philosophy and other liberalizing influences, it was tending from the condition of a tribal to that of a universal creed. But Plato succumbed to the Rabbins. Judaism fell back for eighteen centuries into rigid tribalism, and, as Lord Beaconsfield cynically said of it, has ever since ‘no more sought