The series of College Conferences was resumed last night with the first of Professor Toy's two lectures on "The Development of the Hebrew Religion." Professor Toy did not attempt to give a complete characterization of the Israelitish creed, but only to speak of the features which distinguished it from the other religions of its time, and stamped it with its peculiar individuality. The Hebrew system of the ology is preeminent in its intense religiousness. All ancient nations were religious, as Paul remarked in the case of the Athenians. But the Israelites pursued the theologic idea with a vigor, a persistency, and above all a rational method found in no other people. Religion was to them what philosophy was to the Greeks. This fact cannot fail to strike a scholar of both the Old Testament and the classic poets.

Any characteristic which a people possesses in large measure is sure to show itself in their organized life. Thus the American people has thoroughly organized popular politics, and the English people society. The Hebrews in like manner organized their religion. Any division of the history of this organization into periods must be understood as only roughly correct. A twofold classification seems however justified by the fact that in Israel, as elsewhere, theology grew up in advance of anthropology. The books of the Old Testament written before and during the exile treat mainly of God; the later books aim to define and explain the position of man in the world.

The first problem, then, that confronts us in the study of the religion of the Israelites is their idea of God. Their pursuit of this idea was characterized by the most remarkable directness of purpose and perseverance. The result was monotheism. Many generations of men "toiled in thought" before the world arrived at that conception of one over-ruling deity which is as natural to us as the air we breath. At the time of the prophets the thinking men of all nations were engaged in an intense and almost vain struggle to grasp the idea of one God. Great minds, like Plato, rose at times to a clear monotheistic conception. But the people of all nations save one were wandering in the outer darkness of polytheism, with no apparent exit. To the Hebrews it was given, and to them alone, to arrive at the conception of a single Deity.

It would be interesting to know to what the success of the Israelites in solving the great problem was due. The rigidity of their national feeling doubtless taught them to think no other god but theirs necessary for the world. Yet they do not seem in the beginning to have questioned that the god of the Ammonites ruled in his own territory, and whenever occasion offered they themselves fell to worshiping the deities of the neighboring peoples. It is only by gradual evolution that the Israelites became monotheists, and we are driven in the last resort to account for their final worship of one god by an innate race tendency of which we can give no account.

The monotheism which the Hebrews, by whatever process, finally attained must not be looked upon as a good in itself. Monotheistic doctrines might well coexist with an evil state of society. It was because the prophets always attacked the theological problem from its ethical side that we owe such an immeasurable debt to the civilization which produced Amos and Isaiah.

In his next lecture Professor Toy will speak of the Hebrew idea of man.