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The writer traces the history of the Jewish and Christian religion to show that it exhibits a continuous alternation between anxiety and
obsessive states on the one hand and liberation from such states on the other. To begin with, Moses introduced the liberating phase with his idea of Jahve as a God of war and as a deliverer of the Jews from their Egyptian servitude. This phase of freedom was succeeded by one of compulsion in which Jahve became associated with the cruel God Baal and this new Jahve-Baal exacted ritual and sacrifice. Next followed the God of the prophets, who was a merciful God. But after the tribulations of the captivity the repressive hand of the priestcraft made itself felt and God once again became a retributive figure. In the next phase, Christ appeared as the liberator from fear, with his belief in a God of love; and the idea of punishment disappeared, together with the obsessions and magical beliefs and ritual of the Jewish religion. But with the emergence of St. Paul some of the old fears began to return, as is seen, for instance, in the belief in being saved by faith and the crucifixion, in the pre-occupation with the problem of evil and in the condemnation of all spiritual and physical self-indulgence. This return of compulsion and anxiety was stabilized by Roman Catholicism in its insistence upon the Church as the sole intermediary between God and man, its stereotyped ceremonial and its persecution of heresies. The Reformation was at first a move towards liberation, as is shown by its breaking down of Church orthodoxy, its belief in the forgiveness of sins as a personal matter between God and each individual and its interest in the advancement of human kind; but it once more went over to the gloomier side with the advent of belief in predestination and the widespread practice of witch-hunting. From the sixteenth century onwards the New Protestantism marked a swing of the pendulum towards freedom once more. It showed a great deal