We repeat that we are not much concerned with the growth of the idea of the power of God. We are, however, interested in the manifest teaching or direct implication of the Scriptures that from the beginning the Hebrews thought of God as under obligation to use his power for moral ends. What the moral ends were depended upon the growth of the moral ideal. At the very beginning it was believed that since God had chosen the people of Israel to be his people, he must fight their battles for them. It is from this point of view that we must deal with the early idea of God as a God of battles. God was wielding his force for a moral purpose. Moreover, if God had chosen a people to be the channel through which he was to reveal himself to the world, he must be very patient with that people. How sublime is the Old Testament belief in the patience of God toward Israel! To use the phrase of our later days, God accommodated himself to the progress which the people could make. When the prophets called upon the people to walk with God, they implied a willingness on God's part to walk with the people. If they must lengthen their stride, he must shorten his; he must bear with them in their inadequate notions; he must judge their efforts by the direction in which they were tending rather than by any achievement in itself. It is from the point of view of their growing apprehension of God as moral that we can best understand the ferocity of the Israelite toward the so-called heathen peoples. The boasting of the Israelites over the slaughter of outsiders must be understood from the faith in the moral destiny which the prophets conceived the God of Israel to hold in store for his people. The reason assigned for cruelties and warfares upon heathen peoples was the abominations practiced by those peoples. Of course it is possible for a student obsessed with the modern doctrine of the economic determinism of history to say that we have in the story of the Hebrew development just the play of economic forces with moral aims assigned as their formal justification. Assuming that the narratives of the conquest of Canaan are true, what the Hebrews desired--these economists tell us--was the milk and the honey. They made their so-called advance in obedience to God an excuse for taking possession of the milk and the honey. Now, he would be blind indeed who would deny that economic values do play their part in wars of conquest; he would be foolish who would deny that wars always do justify themselves by appealing to lofty religious motives, but nevertheless the impact of the Hebrew history upon the life of the world has been a moral impact, due to the belief of the Hebrews that they were instruments in the hands of a moral God. If we could behold the abominations in heathenism upon which the old prophets looked, we would sympathize quite readily with an impulse which might seem to call for outright destruction. A friend of mine, a man of the most sensitive