Israel, and engaged its awe, was the not ourselves by which we get the sense for righteousness, and whence we find the help to do right. This conception was indubitably what lay at the bottom of that remarkable change which under Moses, at a certain stage of their religious history, befell the Hebrew people's mode of naming God.[1] This was what they intended in that name, which we wrongly convey, either without translation, by Jehovah, which gives us the notion of a mere mythological deity, or by a wrong translation, Lord, which gives us the notion of a magnified and non-natural man. The name they used was: The Eternal.
Philosophers dispute whether moral ideas, as they call them, the simplest ideas of conduct and righteousness which now seem instinctive, did not all grow, were not once inchoate, embryo, dubious, unformed.[2] That may have been so; the question is an interesting one for science. But the interesting question for conduct is whether those ideas are unformed or formed now. They are formed now; and they were formed when the Hebrews named the power, not of their own making, which pressed upon their spirit: The Eternal. Probably the life of Abraham, the friend of God, however imperfectly the Bible traditions by themselves convey it to us, was a decisive step forwards in the development of these ideas of righteousness. Probably this was the moment when such ideas became fixed and ruling for the Hebrew people, and marked it permanently off from all other peoples who had not made the same step. But long before the first beginnings of recorded history, long before the oldest word of Bible literature, these ideas must have been at work. We know it by the result, although they may have for a long while been but rudimentary. In Israel's earliest
- ↑ See Exodus, iii, 14.
- ↑ 'Qu'est-ce que la nature?' says Pascal; 'peut-être une première coutume, comme la coutume est une seconde nature.'
