Over against the splendid
sanctuary with its imageless worship at the centre of the kingdom
of Judah, the older holy places MUST ever have shrunk farther into
the background, and that not merely in the eyes of the people,
but quite specially also in those of the better classes and of
those whose spiritual advancement was greatest (compare Amos iv.
4,viii.14). If even Hezekiah carried out the unification in Judah
with tolerable thoroughness, the effort after it MUST surely have
been of very early date; for the determination violently to
suppress old sacred usages would not have been easily made, unless
this had been long previously demanded by theory. The priests at
Jerusalem MUST very specially at an early date have arrived at
the conception that their temple with the sacred ark and the great
altar was the one true place of worship, and an author has clothed
this very laudable effort on behalf of the purity of religion in
the form of a law, which certainly in its strictness was quite
impracticable (ILeviticus xvii.4 seq.), and which, therefore, was
modified later by the Deuteronomist with a view to practice.
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