The  feeling  of  the  immediate  relation  of  the  indi-
vidual subject  to  God  could  cease  to  be  connected
with  obedience  to  a  Divine  King  and  Lawgiver  who
spoke  to  a  special  nation  through  the  thunders  of
Sinai,  only  when  God  was  regarded  as  a  Universal
Father  of  spirits.  For  only  such  a  God  can  be
represented  as  the  immanent  principle  of  all  life  and
being,  who  unites  all  men  to  each  other  as  members
of  one  family,  and  who  therefore  is  manifested  in
the  inner  life  and  consciousness  of  each,  only  as,
at  the  same  time.  He  unites  him  to  all  his  fellows
and  to  the  world.
The  long  toil  of  Jewish  history ;  the  struggle  of  the
spirit  of  monotheism  with  the  infection  of  the  sen-
suous nature-worships  of  the  kindred  peoples,  and
with  the  darker  elements  of  its  own  earlier  faith ;  the
destruction  of  the  nation  itself  as  an  outward  secular
power;  the  sufferings  of  its  captivity,  and  the  great
prophetic  inspirations  with  which  it  consoled  itself ;  its
revival  no  longer  as  a  separate  state,  but  rather  as  a
kind  of  monotheistic  church,  holding  itself  apart  from
the  idolatry  of  other  peoples ;  the  long  vicissitude  of
fortune  in  which  it  maintained  its  stubborn  Puri-
tanic protest  against  the  world,  and  nourished  in  its
bosom  the  unquenchable  hope  of  a  Messiah  who  should
redeem  at  once  itself  and  the  world :  this  whole  his-
toric process  furnishes  perhaps  the  most   striking  of


398  THE  EVOLUTION  OF  RELIGION.
