destroy their altars and high places. The lan

guage on the one

subject is as clear and imperative as on the other. There is no room for the plea that the Jew was to defend his own position, without assailing that of his fellows. He was to feel that he had a commission to fight, not chiefly for his own borders, though these would be extended, but mainly as the soldier of God, to put down that which exalted itself against Him. And not only the idol or the idol-temple was to be destroyed; the inhabitants of the idolatrous country, their wives, their children, their sheep, and their oxen, were to be put to death. The leader of the hosts was to set his foot upon the necks of their kings.

What is this, it will be said, but a religious war of the most ferocious kind, a war for establishing the tenets of Judaism, and putting down the tenets of those who differed from it, a war not justified upon the ordinary excuses of lands invaded or threatened, of commerce interrupted, even of fears that such results might happen if no steps were taken to hinder them? How can any war whatsoever, any crusade, be denounced or considered otherwise than praiseworthy and exemplary, if these are defended?

It will be seen at once that such phrases as 'the tenets of Judaism,' the tenets of Heathens,' are not scriptural expressions, or equivalents for any that are to be found in Scripture. They are struck in a different mint. Some may think them much better, belonging to a much more advanced state of civilization. Whether that is so or not, one can

not be substituted for the other; they have nothing in common. We merely read ourselves into the Bible when we introduce them there, and it is an idle thing to pronounce judgment upon a case which we have invented.

Without taking that course, we may consider a few facts which ordinary history makes known to us. If we examine the condition of any people in the old world, we shall, I think, perceive that some apprehensions of a just and righteous Power, the ground of law and order, the protector of boundaries, the avenger of wrong, lay near the heart of them all. In proportion as the people we read of was strong, concentrated, triumphant, so was this feeling strong. But near it lay an element of weakness, division, falsehood. They connected this righteous and avenging Power with some visible objects. Such objects had different aspects in different places, produced different effects on different minds. The worshippers of them became divided, narrow, local. This was one inevitable result. But besides this, they became animal and sensual. Their gods had been formed in great part by their animal and sensual instincts. Every day the thing worshipped became more coloured and perverted by the low habits of the worshipper's mind; every day that mind became grosser from the objects which it reverenced and which it had debased.

But presently there comes in a new cause of corruption. The priest, the witness that there is a Being, or that there are Beings above man,

whom he is intended to worship, promotes the growth of these downward tendencies. He becomes their minister. As the conscience grows indifferent to actual transgressions, the religious acts which he enjoins keep up in it a sort of morbid sensitiveness. Its pains must be removed, though its sins cannot. Hence a whole system of practices, each of which tends to make the belief in God more confused, to make that which is divine more and more in the likeness of the corrupt human, of the animal, of the devilish. It has not been a mistake or delusion into which men have fallen, when they have traced all the moral evils of the world, all its political evils, to its superstitions; that is to say, to its false notions of God. They have only gone wrong when they have failed to see that all these hateful superstitions are the denials of some precious truths, of which the national conscience, the national institutions, even the national idolatry, was testifying. They have only gone wrong when they have refused to see that all the strength, the order, the truth, which have been in any people, must have come from above, because the weakness, disorder, untruth, which were in them, so certainly have come from beneath.

Now what the Scriptures say is this, that the God of the whole earth declared or unveiled Himself to the members of one family, because it was His purpose that in that family all the families of the earth should be blessed; that in due time He raised this family into a nation, revealing to

the members of it His righteousness and truth, through laws, ordinances, and institutions; renewing the covenant which He had made with their forefathers; preserving most carefully the distinctions of their families; treating each as an integral portion of the nation. To this nation it is said He gave the command that they should go forth against certain tribes, the cup of whose iniquities was full-that is to say, in whom idolatry had produced its ultimate effects, in whom it had reached its full consummation, who had lost the very sense of righteousness and order and truth, who were preying upon each other, who had sunk into all unutterable crimes-for the purpose of sweeping their gods, themselves, and everything that belonged to them, from the face of the earth. However we judge of these facts, this we must at least admit to be the statement of them. And therefore the difference between the Jews and other people is precisely this: All the great nations that we read of have effected extensive, and on the whole, salutary conquests. Their triumphs have been the means of spreading law, government, civilization, where they would otherwise not have reached. They have swept away feeble, corrupt, sensualized people, who had become animal-worshippers or devil-worshippers, and had lost all sense of their human dignity. But we feel that the nations who have done these works, have done them in great part for their own glory, for the increase of their territory, at the instigation and for the gratification of particular leaders. All

higher and more blessed results of their success, which it is impossible not to recognize, have been stained and corrupted by the ignoble and selfish tendencies which have mixed with them and been the motives to them; so that we are continually perplexed with the question, what judgment we shall form of them, or what different causes we can find for such opposite effects. There is one nation which is taught from the very first that it is not to go out to win any prizes for itself, to bring home the silver or gold, the sheep or the oxen, the men-servants or the women-servants, that it is to be simply the instrument of the righteous Lord against those who were polluting His earth and making it unfit for human habitation. If this people were represented as a particularly exalted and virtuous people in themselves, their history would throw little light upon that of others. They would be merely rare exceptions, from whose successes or failures no inference could be drawn. But being throughout affirmed and proved to be a hard-hearted, stupid, stiff-necked people, we perceive whence all their strength, vitality, courage proceeded. We see that they were great, and brave, and united, as Moses tells them they would be, just so far as they believed that God was in the midst of them and going forth with them, that this gave all the heart to their enterprises, and that just so far as they lost this, they were meaner and more selfish than all other people. The confusion then that we see elsewhere, is explained and removed here. If we