is;;] POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 425 



gods that live at ease,&quot; the Olympians of Homer, are very 

 different beings from the El or Eloah, the &quot; mighty and 

 dreadful one &quot; of the Semite. The heathenism of the 

 Canaanites and the Phoenicians is never aesthetically 

 beautiful, but vibrates between the opposite yet allied 

 poles of sombre horror and wildest sensuality, between the 

 terrors of Moloch- worship and the orgies of Ashera. 

 Always we find a religion of passionate emotion, not a 

 worship of the outer powers and phenomena of nature in 

 their sensuous beauty and majesty, but of those inner 

 powers, awful because unseen, of which outer things are 

 only the symbol. 1 



Corniptio optimi fit pessima. The very tone of mind 

 which makes Semitic heathenism the most hideous of 

 false worships, enabled the Hebrew nation to grasp with 

 unparalleled tenacity and force the spiritual idea of 

 Jehovah. It is indeed a vain notion of Renan and other 

 theorists that the Semitic races have a peculiar capacity 

 for monotheism. 2 But at least Semitic monotheism could 

 scarcely degenerate into deism or pantheism. Not into 

 deism ; for to view nature as an independent and yet 

 impersonal organism is quite impossible to a habit of 

 thought that everywhere in nature sees life, and life 

 bearing directly upon man : not into pantheism, for even 

 Semitic polytheism looked on material things as symbols 

 rather than as realities, and reverenced only the mysterious 

 and the unseen. To the Hebrew, force is life, and life is 

 personality. The one true God whom man has learned 



1 Hence the simplicity of the material objects which these nations 

 worshipped the sacred stone, the Ashera or sacred pole, the consecrated 

 tree. In the English Version the characteristic features of Canaanite 

 idolatry are disguised by more than one mistranslation. The sacred 

 stone, macfeba, appears as an &quot; image,&quot; the Ashera as a &quot; grove.&quot; 

 Actual images seem to have been repulsively coarse in conception. 

 (Cf. i Kings xv. 13, Heb.) 



2 This notion has been sufficiently refuted by several writers. See 

 especially Dillmann s tract, Uber den Ursprung der ATlichen Religion , 

 p. 1 6 seq. The English reader may compare a paper on Semitic mono 

 theism in the first vol. of Mr. Max Muller s Chips from a German Work 

 shop. 



