exhausted itself.  In reality, it followed the usual order of religious movements, and turned into a priestly organization.  The group of prophets around the first Isaiah prepared the way for the priestly movement that followed a century later.  The group of prophets around the second Isaiah prepared the way for the priestly movement that followed close in their steps.  First comes always, in religion, an epoch of inspiration, and then comes a period of organization.  The organization never bodies fully the spirit of the inspiration.  The ideal is not realizable in institutions.  Institutional religion is always a compromise, a mediation between the lofty conceptions and impatient aspirations of the few who inspire the new life, and the low notions and contented conventionalisms of the many whom they seek to inspire.  The compromise is necessarily of the nature of a reaction; but the interplay of action and re-action is the law of ethical as of chemical forces.

Israel really needed the conserving work of a great organization.  The prophetic religion was far in advance of the popular level.  The high thoughts and lofty ideas of the prophets needed to be wrought into a cultus, which, while not breaking abruptly with the popular religion, should imbue the conventional forms with deeper ethical and spiritual meanings; should, through them, systematically train the people in ethical habits and spiritual conceptions; and should thus gradually educate men out of these forms themselves.

In the providence of God, and under the influences of His patient Spirit, this needful system was developed in the exile:  a system whose symbolism was so charged with ethical and spiritual senses that it led on to Christ; as the Epistle to the Hebrews rightly shows and as Paul distinctly declares.  As the first priestly period, following the first prophetic epoch, bodied that double movement in a book—­Deuteronomy; so the second priestly period, following the second prophetic epoch, bodied this double movement in a book, or group of books—­the present form of the Pentateuch.  The traditions and histories and legislations of the past were worked over into a connected series of writings, through which was woven the new priestly system, in a historical form.  On the restoration to Judea, this institutional reorganization was set up as the law of the land, and continued thenceforward in force—­the providential instrumentality for the ad interim work of four centuries.  Such a remarkable process of development, so deepening in us a sense of the guiding hand of God, ought to show some sign of its working, in the literature of the period.  However clear, from our general knowledge, the tendencies which were at work in that period, we could not feel assured of our correct interpretation of this most important epoch, in the absence of some such sign, in a writing of that date.