Page:Genesis I-II- (IA genesisiii00grot).pdf/88

selves in their religion had not risen above Nature worship. During the religious struggles of the Hebrews, Yahvism passed through a stage in which Yahveh was the chief god, others being tolerated, to a time in which all other gods were completely degraded from their position as deities. This position of Yahveh as merely the principal deity, is paralleled by that of Jupiter and Zeus at a later epoch in the mythology of Indo-European nations. There is much to be said in favor of the idea that Yahveh originally personated the movements of Nature, or life, although the connection is as yet obscure. But the coloring of the conception of Yahveh by the later Prophets is one which is now indelibly affixed. Yahveh stands out pre-eminently as the rewarder of just, and the punisher of unjust actions among men. At the time when Christianity appeared, the Hebrew mind was endeavoring to free itself from the anthropomorphic conceptions which clung to Yahveh. This is quite apparent in certain teachings of our Saviour. Yahveh was no longer then in advanced minds among the Jews, a Being who loved and hated, was pleased and angry. These conceptions we are yet struggling with, in the progress towards abstract Theism. We have abandoned, on the Nature-side of philosophy, the idea that there is a God behind each particular object, and have arrived at the conception that there is only one God behind all objects. But we cling very naturally to the Aryan philosophy rather than the Semitic, and our God is especially a conception drawn from the outside world of Nature, although we call him Jehovah, who is especially the God of inside motive and conduct.

For this reason we are fond of Genesis, which portrays our God in the guise of a wholesale manufacturer of bird and beast and flower, and we flatter ourselves that he exerted the most ingenuity and skill of his creation of ourselves after his own image. Alas! embryology tells us that in one stage we