THE CONTROVERSIALIST l8l 



Therefore, to whatever high spiritual altitudes the 

 Israelites attained, and however distinctive may have 

 been their genius for religion, — a genius which shaped 

 their traditions, whether native or borrowed, in ac- 

 cordance with their belief in their special mission as 

 instruments and witnesses of Jehovah among man- 

 kind, and which inspired their prophets to utterances 

 unsurpassed in grandeur of expression and in loftiness 

 of moral tone, — the documents of their religion evi- 

 dence that they passed through stages of develop- 

 ment corresponding to those of other races j stages 

 of crude and coarse conceptions of the gods, attended 

 by a bloody ritual and a low morality. 



While Huxley was busy over this subject, there 

 appeared the article by Mr. Gladstone, to the invigo- 

 rating effects of which reference was made on page 

 56. In his notice of M. Reville's book Mr. Glad- 

 stone took exception to the statement that while the 

 Creation story and other narratives in the Pentateuch 

 " possess a value of the highest order, they are not to 

 be regarded as other than a venerable fragment, well 

 deserving attention, of the great genesis of mankind." 

 This was reducing them to the level of ordinary 

 secular history, and hence Mr. Gladstone sought to 

 prove that, instead of " merely a lofty poem or a 

 skilfully constructed narrative," we have, in the He- 

 brew cosmogony and all that follows it, " a revc- 



