of the virgin rock which may be seen obtruding even in the busy thorougfares of a modern Scandinavian city. All the evidences of culture and progress are around it, but it tells a story of far-distant days when the red granite stood out bleak and naked to the northern storms. The consecration in Israel of a whole national literature created many moral and social problems when the nation had outgrown its primitive conditions and looked back with perplexity on sacred precedents, which none the less offended the conscience. Polygamy and the Levirate-marriage were instances of such sacred but unsatisfactory precedents.
In the next place, there had been operative in Israel from very early times another influence, that of the prophets, which sometimes as in this case worked in the same direction with the general tendency and sometimes worked in a diverse direction altogether. Now the later prophets were consistently monogamists. Partly, their relatively intense
