360 THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY vni 



thinkers, like those of all polytheistic philosophers, 

 from Polynesia to Greece, tend; if indeed the 

 theology of the period of the nineteenth dynasty 

 was not, as some Egyptologists think, a modifica- 

 tion of an earlier, more distinctly monotheistic 

 doctrine of a long antecedent age. It took only 

 half a dozen centuries for the theology of Paul to 

 become the theology of Gregory the Great ; and 

 it is possible that twenty centuries lay between 

 the theology of the first worshippers in the 

 sanctuary of the Sphinx and that of the priests of 

 Ramses Maimun. 



It may be that the ten commandments and the 

 Book of the Covenant are based upon faithful 

 traditions of the efforts of a great leader to raise 

 his followers to his own level. For myself, as a 

 matter of pious opinion, I like to think so ; as I 

 like to imagine that, between Moses and Samuel, 

 there may have been many a seer, many a herds- 

 man such as him of Tekoah, lonely amidst the 

 hills of Ephraim and Judah, who cherished and 

 kept alive these traditions. In the present results 

 of Biblical criticism, however, I can discover no 

 justification for the common assumption that, 

 between the time of Joshua and that of Rehoboam, 

 the Israelites were familiar with either the 

 Deuteronomic or the Levitical legislation ; or that 

 the theology of the Israelites, from the king who 

 sat on the throne to the lowest of his subjects, was 

 in any important respect different from that which 



