one, the chief for his own nation: "Who among the Gods is like unto Thee, O Jehovah!" That is the position of the Hebrews, and they have their own National God. To go away from him is treachery to the State. To disbelieve in him is punishable with death, because it is treason to the Nation, and such punishment was not so much regarded as a religious persecution as a State penalty. As a State and social sanction, the worship of Yahveh was maintained among the Hebrews; it was the State, the National, Religion. He conquered the Gods of the Philistines, He fought with the Gods of all the other people round about, each with their own God. Then you come to a new aspect. The people of Israel are scattered; they are carried away captives into Babylon. They come into touch with the great Theologies of the East, and then a new view of God is taken by their writers. You may draw a line in the Hebrew Old Testament between the post-Babylon, and the pre-Babylon views of God. That is done now by every scholar. The pre-Babylon view is that of the Tribal God, one among many; the post-Babylon view is the sublime conception drawn from a great eastern faith, and then we find poetic and splendid phrases regarding God. He is the "High and Lofty One who inhabiteth Eternity, whose Name is Holy". There you have a spiritual thought. You are no longer within the region of the tribal Gods. You are out of the region of the local Deities; you have passed on into a great and spiritual world, where God inhabits Eternity, and where, in another splendid phrase, it is written: "God made man in the image of His own Eternity." There you have the later conception, there the God Universal; and with that, one remarkable fact that you must never forget, that in the later writing God is recognised not as what we call the Author of good only, but the Author of evil also. It is written in the Prophet Isaiah: "I am the Lord, and there is none else; I form the light and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these things." It is written again: "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?" You must realise that where God is seen as "the One," when there is "none else," then He is the Author of all, and not only of the particular line of narrow morality that belongs to the evolving human kind. So also in the _Bhagavaḍ-Gīṭā_ you find the phrase of Shrī Kṛṣhṇa: "I am the gambling of the cheat." I shall come back to that in order to point out to you its meaning, but at the moment I only ask you to remember that in what is now called the Christian Bible, not in the Hebrew part of it only, but in the Christian part as well, you find that same conception of one "Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world," that shows itself in every form, that cannot be divorced from anything that exists. And so, in a very splendid psalm, again post-Babylon, you have the psalmist saying: "If I go up into Heaven, Thou art there; if I