our knowledge of the way in which human progress is achieved. But there is nothing more instructive than the relation of these different hopes to each other as the historian understands them and there is nothing more worthy and inspiring than the language in which the most spiritual and the most universal of these hopes are expressed.

The original hope of the religion of Israel was that involved in the unique and exclusive relation between the nation Israel and Yahweh, its God. It was the hope of Israel's prosperity and power through the certain favor of Yahweh, and his intervening help in times of danger, most of all his help in the nation's wars. These were "the Wars of Yahweh." Both the strength and the defect of the Old Testament religion lie in this fundamental faith, the peculiarity and exclusiveness of the relation between Israel and its God. It inspired its early victories and created the kingdom of David. It sustained the nation amid calamities and enabled it to maintain itself when other small nations disappeared before the great world empires, and while these also came and passed. It was a natural and not unreasonable faith for its time, so long as Yahweh was only Israel's national God, even though he was believed to be better and stronger than the gods of other nations and destined to triumph over them; but when Israel's God was believed to be the one and only God of all the world the doctrine of Israel as his peculiar people must either lead to false claims and have bad effects upon temper and conduct, or else be reinterpreted and radically changed. Nothing can be more instructive as to the nature of religious hope than to follow out two main lines of development by which an adjustment was attempted between this primitive nationalism and the later, larger thought of God and the world.

The great prophets before the exile, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and after exile Deutero-Isaiah, were those through whom the faith was attained that Yahweh is the one and only God; and the modification of the national exclusiveness of Israel which they made was in the direction of its complete subordination to ethical and spiritual ideals. The one God of all was the God of righteousness, and of Israel only on the condition and for the end of righteousness. But an ethical in place of a national relation to God meant, if it was carried through consistently, a universal relation of God to all men as individuals, instead of a peculiar relation to one favored nation. Consistency was not reached, yet glimpses, sometimes clear momentary visions, of this individual, universal, ethical religion are to be found in the great prophets; and in them the Old Testament religion reaches its height. It is the prophetic denial of national claims and hopes, not the older and always prevalent assertion of them, that constitutes the reality and truth of the Old Testament hope. It is hope for Yahweh and his righteousness, not for Israel and its glory. It finds its highest expression in such predictions as Isaiah's promise of security to the humble and believing; and Jeremiah's expectation of the time when no special revelation will make known the will of God to a chosen few, but when everyone will have his own inward knowledge of God; and Ezekiel's belief that the new inward nature which every man requires if he is to do that will of God which he knows, will be achieved not only by his own free moral choice (18:31), but also by the divine spirit, the transforming presence and power of God (36:26, 27); and in Deutero-Isaiah's interpretation of the peculiar relation of Israel to the one God of all the world as that of Yahweh's Servant, his prophet to all nations, who brings light to the heathen and deliverance from bondage, and who effects this ministry even through his own shame and suffering for others' sins.

But there was a second still later way of adjusting the original nationalism of Israel's faith and hope to monotheism and the conception of a unity in nature and history; and this proved easier and more popular than the other. In late prophecy and apocalypse the hope of Israel's national and worldly prosperity and power takes on an unearthly character. Instead of righteousness and spirituality as in the earlier prophets, transcendence and heavenliness interpret or displace the primitive hope. The heavenly region to which apocalyptic prophecy transferred Israel's hope was a refinement of the physical, but it was still essentially physical, a region whose riches could be as sensibly enjoyed and as selfishly desired as the palace and throne of an earthly kingdom. The heavenly powers by which this hope was to be realized were divine, yet they were essentially material forces. The prophetic hopes at their highest rest on human nature at its highest, on the conscience and reason of man recognized as the will and thought of God. But the apocalyptic hope, though it strains language to magnify the contrast between its two worlds, the earthly and the heavenly, the present and the future, does not succeed in making them really different. Supernaturalism always fails to find the real difference between man and God and so the way in which the difference is to be overcome. This supernaturalism of the apocalypse is seen also in the ways in which the hope is revealed. The seer interprets in literal or artful ways the language of prophetic scriptures regarded as divine oracles, or he is translated in ecstasy to heaven and shown the secrets of the upper world and the future. The coming of this new heavenly world men may pray for, and the time of its coming they may seek to discover from sacred writings and traditions and from the signs of the times, but only divine powers can bring this evil world to an end, and only from heaven where they already are can descend, in heaven's own time and way, the scenery and the actors in the last great drama of history. There is in this hope no strong ethical appeal, no prevailing sense that in the inward region of the heart and in its instincts and desires and wills, God's presence is to be found and his work for man experienced. Moreover this hope for a new heavenly world means no hope for the present world. It is evil and must grow more evil until God intervenes to destroy it and brings down from heaven the realm of good. To renounce the world and withdraw from it is the course of wisdom and holiness. As a way of adjusting Israel's national hope to monotheism it is not comparable with the prophetic way of ethics and inwardness. It is still Israel, or the true Israel, that is to inherit the world to come; and at its coming the world empire must first of all be overthrown, for the new kingdom, heavenly and supernatural though it is, is enough like the kingdom of Greece or of Rome to require its fall and to take its place. The apocalyptic hope is the end of Old Testament prophecy, but not its height. It was no doubt in some sense fitted for its times, hard times, always, when the evils of life seemed irremediable. It knew the need of divine help, and it encouraged endurance and fidelity even to death. But it was not grounded in the nature of men, and it was mistaken in its conception of the nature of the world. It never quite escapes this inherent falseness and confusion in its fundamental assumptions.

It cannot be hard to pass judgment on the relative value of these three main hopes of the Old Testament. The primitive hope for God's special favor to his own peculiar people who are destined to have dominion over all others would have seemed, before the war, safely outgrown by humanity. If the world still needed a demonstration of the danger and falsity of any nation's belief in its peculiar excellence and in its exclusive right and destiny to rule, and the intolerable morals and preposterous religion that finally result from such claims, the aggressors in the present war have supplied it, and the rest of the world is united in the resolve that no further demonstration of this hope be undertaken. The early histories of the Old Testament and parts of its laws, its psalms and even its prophecies, contain expressions