362 THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY vm 



of sacrifices and ceremonies might logically have 

 held their own against anything the prophets 

 have to say ; it was an ethical criticism. From 

 the height of his moral intuition that the whole 

 duty of man is to do justice and to love mercy and 

 to bear himself as humbly as befits his insignifi- 

 cance in face of the Infinite the prophet simply 

 laughs at the idolaters of stocks and stones and 

 the idolaters of ritual. Idols of the first kind, in 

 his experience, were inseparably united with the 

 practice of immorality, and they were to be ruth- 

 lessly destroyed. As for sacrifices and ceremonies, 

 whatever their intrinsic value might be, they might 

 be tolerated on condition of ceasing to be idols ; 

 they might even be praiseworthy on condition of 

 being made to subserve the worship of the true 

 Jahveh the moral ideal. 



If the realm of David had remained undivided, 

 if the Assyrian and the Chaldean and the 

 Egyptian had left Israel to the ordinary course of 

 development of an Oriental kingdom, it is possible 

 that the effects of the reforming zeal of the pro- 

 phets of the eighth and seventh centuries might 

 have been effaced by the growth, according to its 

 inevitable tendencies, of the theology which they 

 combated. But the captivity made the fortune 

 of the ideas which it was the privilege of these 

 men to launch upon an endless career. With the 

 abolition of the Temple-services for more than half 

 a century, the priest must have lost and the scribe 



