The destruction of Jehovah's
altars or the persecution of His prophets was not at all proposed,
or even the introduction of a foreign cultus elsewhere than in
Samaria. Jehovah's sovereignty over Israel being thus only
remotely if at all imperilled, the popular faith found nothing
specially offensive in a course of action which had been followed
a hundred years before by Solomon also. Elijah alone was strenuous
in his opposition; the masses did not understand him, and were far
from taking his side. To him only, but not to the nation, did it
seem like a halting between two opinions, an irreconcilable
inconsistency, that Jehovah should be worshipped as Israel's God
and a chapel to Baal should at the same time be erected in Israel.
In solitary grandeur did this prophet tower conspicuously over
his time; legend, and not history, could alone preserve the
memory of his figure. There remains a vague impression that with
him the development of Israel's conception of Jehovah entered upon
a new stadium, rather than any data from which it can be
ascertained wherein the contrast of the new with the old lay.
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