power of the priesthood act and react on each other, each increment of increased power in one lifting the other a stage higher.

Other elements besides nationalism increase the dignity of worship and the power of the priesthood. In India, during and after the Vedic period, ritualism and priesthood acted and reacted, till the Brahmanas present a religion almost turned magic, and the Brahman caste fastened a priesthood permanently on Indian civilization. The history of Christianity presents another phase of the action and reaction of ritual and priesthood. No other religious history, however, gives any account of the growth of ritual and priesthood as a part of the growth of national religion. This is a unique contribution of Israel.

And how fully the Bible gives the story! How clearly the steps of the development can be traced! The old local shrines of the tribal stage hold their place while the temple at Jerusalem grows in importance from the private shrine of the luxury-loving Solomon to a national religious center. When the time was ripe, the Deuteronomic law swept away the shrines to exalt the temple; but even that might not have been effective without the tragedy of the fall of Jerusalem and the exile. The story of the temple is exceedingly enlightening for the history of national religion.

The shrine which will best compare with this temple is the Altar of Heaven in Peking. That also was a national place of worship. It was the one place in the nation where the highest god was worshipped. But there the likeness ends and contrast begins. This Altar did not represent the triumph of a national priesthood, but was the survival of the pre-priestly stage, when the head of the family or state did the worship for his people. The Emperor sacrificed for the nation. The divine Power, Heaven, there worshipped, became increasingly an abstract principle more than a personal god. Other gods satisfied the religious needs of the people. It is as though in Israel the ritual of the Mosaic day had survived in the temple, the king only worshiping Jahveh twice a year; and the people had developed unhindered their tendency to

Baal worship. The temple would have lost most of its value for the history of religion.

The national tendency to exalt ritual and priesthood had in Israel its checks and balances. One was in the popular worship of the local Baals. It is possible that for a time the growing dignity of the national God may have even increased the influence of the Baals. Jahveh lived above. The Baals lived with the people. Jahveh was the God of Israel's armies. The Baal gave them their corn and wine, if they poured oil on his mazzebah. Another check was the work of the prophets. The tendency of the more formal worship of a greater god is always to transform a living religion into magical forms and priestly fees. It is a great step in progress when national religion lifts a god into greatness, but the next step is over a precipice. This step the prophets succeeded in keeping Israel from taking, but it required all their power to do it. The prophets were themselves ardent nationalists, but their protest was against the fruitage of national religion.

Another unique contribution of the Bible is the record of the growth of personal from national religion. The greatest step in the evolution of religion is that from the institutional to the personal stage. The institution may be tribal, national, or priestly. In any case, the god of the institutional religion holds his relation to man, not directly, but because of man's dependence on, or affiliation with, some other person or group of persons. In India personal religion arose in the midst of a most extreme system of ritualism. It came in two forms, Buddhism and orthodox philosophy. Buddha cut free from institutionalism altogether, and founded a wholly personal religion on the basis of Hindu conceptions. The orthodox religion devised a most ingenious way of meeting the eternal conflict between the institutional and the personal. When a man became old, and his hair grey, and he saw the son of his son, he might leave his home and go into the forest and there seek truth by meditation. This scheme divides life.

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S. B. E., Vol. XXV, Laws of Manu, ch. VI, 1 ff.

During the greater part of it man is under the priesthood. In his old age he becomes an individualist. Thus the irreconcilable was reconciled; but it worked only because of indifference. Most men never passed beyond the priestly stage; which was no great matter, for there were numberless incarnations ahead of them. Some, like Buddha, became forest hermits without waiting for old age. The whole history of the rise of personal religion in India is extremely interesting.

In Israel personal religion was born of national religion, was formed within it and nourished by its blood. The whole process of its development is traced for us in the Hebrew literature. Instead of coming from a conflict, personal religion arose and grew and reached its completion among the most devoted and effective champions of nationalism, the prophets. The religion of the prophets was not unique. It rests on a very wide-spread belief that man can do deeds and speak words inspired by deity. Here was the beginning of personal religion. But the prophet did not immediately draw the conclusion that the relation between God and all men was personal, for his own personal relation was only because he was a messenger to the nation. The second step was his conviction that God required righteousness between man and man. Now sin and righteousness are personal. The actions were of individuals, but the prophets promised reward and threatened punishment to the nation, without discrimination between individuals. This could not go on indefinitely. At some time, under some circumstances, the fact that ethics is personal must break up the national tradition of religion, however hoary with age it might be. That time came with the exile. The great step from national to personal religion was taken consciously by the young priest Ezekiel, as he strove to find a new basis for the shattered religion, its national foundations overthrown by the overthrow of the walls of Jerusalem. It came not without preparation. The experiences of many prophets, and the growing sense of individual responsibility for ethical conduct, had paved the way for the new idea. When once it came to clear consciousness,

personal religion was always thereafter an unquestioned factor of Hebrew religion.

How the national factor still persisted; how the two stood side by side without open conflict; how they nevertheless raised problems not always easy to answer; how Christianity dropped the national and kept the personal; these are facts so familiar that I need not dwell on them. What I am interested in emphasizing now is that the Bible lays out for our inspection the fullest and clearest exhibit available of the beginning, development and culmination of this most important step in the growth of religion.

The growth of monotheism furnishes another element of very great value. The biblical record of it is unique in two ways. First, nowhere else can the development of monotheism be so clearly traced. It is easy to see how the earlier prophetic monolatry led to it. The final outburst of clear and uncompromising monotheism in Second Isaiah has no parallel in other literatures. Chemists speak of the nascent state, when a chemical compound, at the moment of its formation, is more potent than at any other time. To catch a religious idea in its nascent state is one of the joys of scholarship; and here it is, for monotheism.

Second, it is the one place where we can trace the growth of an ethical monotheism. Other religions have recognized only one Supreme Power in the universe. Sometimes it came from the exaltation of one god above his fellows. Such was the brief interlude of monotheism which Akhnaton interjected in Egypt's polytheism. In India it came as the result of philosophical reasoning on the nature of reality and issued, not in monotheism, but in an impersonal monism. In China it came from the recognition of a single source for the order of the universe. Here, too, the usual interpretation of this Supreme, Tien, Heaven, has been impersonal, though I have met Confucian scholars who disagreed. So does Bruce, in his excellent study, Chu Hsi and His Masters. In Japanese Buddhism the impersonal Dharmakaya, drawn ultimately from

7 J. P. Bruce, London, 1923.

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Indian monism, sometimes receives attributes which belong only to a personal God. But in none of these cases is the monotheism primarily ethical in its origin. To see the development of an ethical Supreme Being we must come to the Bible.

Another idea whose growth can be traced in the Bible is that of the love of God. Rising out of the tragedy of life with Hosea, carried on by the Deuteronomic writers, taken into personal religion by the Psalmists, exalted to be the central attribute of God in the New Testament, its history lies open to view. The conception has one counterpart in other religions, although that is a less vivid, fructifying idea. It is the Confucian conception often translated Benevolence, but which seems really to be worthy the name Love. We do not know its history, and its interpretation has been more abstract, less richly human, than the biblical conception of the love of God. This is natural, for Heaven, whose chief attribute it is, has itself been mostly regarded as abstract. Love has been a principle in the universe, setting a standard for the actions of man, not because of loyalty to a personal God, but because "a reasonable being should act reasonably."

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Life after death is another belief whose history can be traced in the Bible more fully than in other scriptures. It passes from the idea of a shadowy realm of the dead, common in all primitive religions, to a life where punishment and reward redress the seeming injustices of this world.

Three times religion has developed the idea of a future life ethically related to the present life. Once was the karma of India a karma working itself out at least partly in reincarnations. Once was the vivid, picturesque ideas of judgment and future life in Zoroastrianism. 10 Once was the Hebrew conception of heaven and hell, more clearly revealed

• See Suzuki, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, pp. 223, 232-241. "It is a living spirit that manifests itself in nature as well as in thought" (p. 223). "Dharmakaya is not only an intelligent mind, but a loving heart" (p. 232).

Bruce, Chu Hsi and his Masters, pp. 263 ff.

10 Ardâ Vîrât XVII. See also S. B. E., XXIII, pp. 314 ff., 342 ff.