ISRAELITE AND INDIAN. 207 



more violent case of marriage between father and daughter, it did 

 not accomplish that for which it has been so highly praised. 



The late prohibition of a man's marriage to his deceased wife's 

 sister can not be successfully defended on any principle of physi- 

 ology or sociology. It is a blunder that perhaps arose in the 

 transition stage from the matriarchate to the patriarchate method. 



Conclusions. The Indians have been characterized as pe- 

 culiar among the races of men. One school of writers has pro- 

 nounced them to be feres, natures, and wholly incapable of receiv- 

 ing civilization. Others have held the opposite view, that they 

 were eminently spiritualistic, as was proved by their having pre- 

 served the pure pristine faith to a degree beyond all other se- 

 cluded peoples. Both of these assertions are disproved. When 

 Indians have been allowed reasonable opportunities, they have 

 advanced in civilization, and have thriven under it. "While their 

 religion may in one sense be pristine, it does not differ materially 

 from that found in many other regions. 



The peculiarity of the Semites, and especially of that branch 

 of them lately styled the Syro- Aramaeans (which is only an ethno- 

 graphic name including the Israelites), has been accepted as an 

 axiom. It was pronounced that they were specially adapted to a 

 spiritual religion ; that whether through an exclusive revelation, 

 or because their racial constitution was exceptionally receptive to 

 such revelation, their idiosyncrasy disposed them readily to spir- 

 itual ideas, which to modern minds means monotheism. This is 

 not the record of the historical books of the Old Testament, even 

 after their manipulation. The prophets of Israel declared the 

 exact contrary ; they denounced their own people as rejecting 

 spiritual truth, and as not deserving the favor of Jahveh. 



The historical books of Israel which we possess are not his- 

 torical records, but are historic legends reduced to writing by 

 writers who had sometimes political and sometimes religious ends 

 in view. The argument of those tales is that all the people habit- 

 ually worshiped Jahveh, and him alone, during which normal 

 period they were prosperous, but that sometimes under evil influ- 

 ence they abandoned him and fell into disaster, until, after suffi- 

 cient chastisement, they returned to the true worship. The his- 

 toric truth is that the old Israelites, when disasters came, as they 

 always do come, gave up the worship of their national god as 

 not a success, and tried the gods of their neighbors. They re- 

 turned to Jahveh because the other gods did not satisfy them any 

 better. In fact, the people had no fixed or distinct faith, and it 

 is not correct to accuse them of backsliding when they were only 

 vacillating. 



The prophets tried to pull the Israelites too rapidly through 



