and Israel for the first time constituted a Church. But it was a Church
with no visible home. Christianity for several centuries was to have a
centre at Rome, Islam at Mecca. But Judaism had and has no centre at all.

It will be obvious that the aim of the present book makes it both
superfluous and inappropriate to discuss the vexed problems connected with
the origins of the Religion of Israel, its aspects in primitive times,
its passage through a national to an ethical monotheism, its expansion
into the universalism of the second Isaiah. What concerns us here is
merely the legacy which the Religion of Israel bequeathed to Judaism as
we have defined it. This legacy and the manner in which it was treasured,
enlarged, and administered will occupy us in the rest of this book.

But this much must be premised. If the Religion of Israel passed through
the stages of totemism, animism, and polydemonism; if it was indebted
to Canaanite, Kenite, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and other foreign
influences; if it experienced a stage of monolatry or henotheism (in
which Israel recognised one God, but did not think of that God as the
only God of all men) before ethical monotheism of the universalistic
type was reached; if, further, all these stages and the moral and
religious ideas connected with each left a more or less clear mark in
the sacred literature of Israel; then the legacy which Judaism received
from its past was a syncretism of the whole of the religious experiences
of Israel as interpreted in the light of Israel's latest, highest, most
approved standards. Like the Bourbon, the Jew forgets nothing; but unlike
the Bourbon, the Jew is always learning. The domestic stories of the
Patriarchs were not rejected as unprofitable when Israel became deeply
impregnated with the monogamous teachings of writers like the author
of the last chapter of Proverbs; the character of David was idealised
by the spiritual associations of the Psalter, parts of which tradition