their own gods, and one of them came from Moab and worshipped Chemosh. Now Mesha of Moab, whom we find turning away the Hebrews by burning his son on the walls of his city in their sight, tells on the famous Moabite stone how his god Chemosh told him to go against Israel, and how he took away the vessels of Yahweh and dragged them before Chemosh, and how Chemosh drove out the King of Israel. No doubt Chemosh was the leader of Mesha's Ale-im, and they were quite as powerful as the Ale-im of the Hebrews. Much has been written about this plural, some upholding that it is merely the plural of majesty, the Royal we, pluralis majestatis," but that is only used when the majesty speaks of itself; every nation uses the singular when the King or God is spoken of, and further, if it were the plural of majesty, why did not the translators so render it in English? Why did they put it as "gods," plural with a small "g" so as to remove all "majestic effect when it was the gods of the Canaanites, Hittites, Philistines, or other foreign tribe; and as "God," singular, with a capital "G," to give it a false majesty when it referred to the equally barbaric gods of the Hebrews?

I say barbaric gods because Samuel says:

2nd Sam., 22, 8-15, "There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth

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devoured, coals were kindled by it [a true 'dragon] and he rode upon a cherub and did

fly, and he was seen upon the wings of the "wind. Through the brightness before him were coals of fire kindled." Job also makes his god describe the Behemoth or leviathan, which is chief of the ways of ' god,'" in the same words, Job 41, 18-21, "Out of his mouth

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go burning flares, and sparks of fire leap out. "Out of his nostrils goeth smoke as out of a seething pot or chaldron. His breath kindleth coals and a flame goeth out of his "mouth." So the Leviathan was identical with Jové, or Iové, as it should be written.

This is the ancient picture of Yahweh, Jehovah, or Iové, called Lord in our Bible, but it remained the same in the new form of the Hebrew faith we call Christianity, as, in Hebrews xii., 29, we are told that "Our God is a consuming fire," and Revelation is full of the god's fire and smoke.

Such descriptions may make us smile, but in early times, when man still believed in all sorts of dragons, such a god was the true god of Fear, which was the first god man worshipped,

and the basis of all religion. "He who feared not had no religion.'

The plural of majesty is now utterly discredited. Another argument is that the singlar verb is used although the noun is plural. But the noun means, as Dr. Cheyne tells us, a company or band of gods, so we may speak of "An " aleim, as of " a God company, and the singular article and verb are quite right. But all authorities are agreed that Ale-im is gods, but if a new edition of the Bible were issued with "gods as the English of Ale-im, and Iové as the English of IhOh, the entire basis of the dogmatic part of the Bishop's official religion would be shattered, so they prefer to go on "saying that which is not."

Again the gods commune together" the man is become as one of us,' "" let us go down," "Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion " [so more than one being was made, male and female],"In that day the Ale-im created man

in the likeness of the Ale-im created he them "male and female," so the gods had male and female forms or were androgynous or double sexed as many believed. But the latter possibility is excluded by the Bible story as man and woman were made in the likeness of the

gods "in our image," so if the gods were androgynous man would have been double sexed also. Woman must have been made in the exact likeness of a god, so there were male and female gods in the early Hebrew heaven, just as in the Greek and Roman heavenly host. As Dr. Budge, the learned head of Egyptian section of the British Museum, says, "Man

always has fashioned his gods in his own image and he has always given to his gods. "wives and offspring" (Gods of the Egyptians, Vol. I., p. 287), so we see that the idea of gods and their surroundings grow and change, or as Byron put it:

"Even gods must yield, religions take their turn;

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'Twas Jove's, 'tis Mahomet's, and other creeds

"Will rise with other years.

And we must try to see how our Hebrew Ale-im grew, whence they sprung, and how they passed out of fashion and died. (This is fully treated in The Gods of the Hebrew Bible.)

CHAPTER II

NATURE WORSHIP AMONG THE HEBREWS

The gods of religions are often very vague, and are addressed in poetic terms which allow of great license, so the idea is often so visionary and fluid that it is difficult to grasp and fix it. On the other hand, religions give us the great compensating advantage that as all religious things are holy, and only holy through age, and any reforming change is sacrilege, often punished with death. So the old conceptions live on in the sacred literature in the more enlightened times, and we can arrive at the real meaning of the god names from these remnants of the original signification preserved in the text on account of the supposed absolute truth and the inviolability of the original text.

There are fragments scattered through the Bible, like erratic boulders in a modern field, telling of the ancient currents of thought, but