tional theory nor liable to be sophisticated by plausible special pleading. The verdict may be that views long held require to be considerably modified; it may also be that much that is now put forward as certain is at least very doubtful. But the inquiry, if conducted honestly, can only tend to the advancement of truth.

CHAPTER I.

THE RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL.

Place of Israel among the nations of antiquity—Land, literature, institutions-The distinctive feature of the history is the religion—Its worldwide influence: modern Judaism, Christianity, Islam—“ National religions and universal religions"-As a matter of history the religion of Israel is "something more" than other principal religions—The question is, What is the difference? and for an answer we must go back to the earlier times.

THE history of Israel has attractions such as no other> history presents. No nation ever had so wonderful a a beginning; none exhibits a more tragic close. The figures that mark the stadia of its checkered history are not the dim shadowy forms that elsewhere meet us in antiquity, but men of warm human sympathy, with strongly marked individuality. The details of the lives of Old Testament worthies have wrought themselves into all literatures, and made themselves the world's possession. People in modern Christian lands are more familiar with the history of Israel than with the ancient history of their own countries, and feel more interest in the characters of Old Testament story than in the great men of their own nations. The graphic delineations of patriarchs and heroes take powerful hold of the imagination of the old and young in all lands. The

missionary to the heathen finds a ready access to the minds of his hearers by means of the simple and impressive recital of the deeds of Israel's great men. And in the battles for religious freedom and national righteousness, reformers have been nerved by the example of Old Testament patriots and prophets to fight manfully for the truth. The very land which was the home of Israel is unique. in its geographical and topographical features. A piece of territory no larger than Wales embraces within itself the climate, natural scenery, and products of lands the most far apart. By its physical features and natural boundaries it is as sharply marked off from adjacent lands, as it is distinguished from any country of its size on the face of the earth. Within this territory, debarred for the most part from the seaboard, lived a people that was contemporaneous with the great world-empires of antiquity, but in true greatness has infinitely surpassed them. Looked at as one of the nationalities of Western Asia, its external history seemed indeed to run a course parallel with theirs. A number of kindred tribes are federated together, and after a time the monarchy arises. Then a schism takes place, and there is a double line of kings, waging their wars and ruling their states very much after the fashion of the kings around them. The institutions, the priesthood, the ritual, the language of Israel, bear strong resemblances to those of kindred Semitic peoples in their neighbourhood; and finally, when the great world-powers absorb those other nationalities or sweep them away, the Israelitish state is also shattered, and its people disappears from the scene. Yet, looked at more closely, Israel presents a broad contrast to those smaller kindred states, and is in essential points clearly distinguished from the greater world-empires. For Israel has not ceased to exist, and its influ

Israel and the World-Empires.

13

ence has gone forth into all the earth. The petty nationalities of kindred blood in the immediate neighbourhood have disappeared, leaving scarcely a trace of their existence. The great empires of Assyria and Egypt, whose armies fought across the body of Israel for world-dominion, have crumbled to ruins. The Roman empire, with its iron heel, trampled the Jewish nationality to the ground, but there was a vitality which it could not crush. Greece, like Palestine, was a small country, and its people, like Israel, played a distinguished part in the world's history. Israel, however, had put on record complete annals of its marvellous career before the time that the "father of history" appeared in Greece; and though possessing neither the art, nor the philosophy, nor the science of ancient Egypt, has effected in the world what neither Greece with all these acquirements, nor Rome with its law, nor the Eastern empires with their massive force, could accomplish.

Something very distinctive must have been early achieved or acquired by Israel to enable it to remain apart from these nationalities, great or small, and to outlast them so conspicuously. It was something of a more fundamental' kind than the ordinary attainments of civilisation-something nearer to the heart of mankind, belonging in a manner to all ages, and destined to last when the strait bonds of Jewish nationality should have been snapped, and when the greatest of world-empires should have done their best and their worst for the human race. By some inherent force this race, set in the midst of the great nations of the earth, and surrounded by powerful em

1 The date of Herodotus is 484-443 B.C.; Ezra came to Jerusalem in the year 458. The pre-Socratic period of Greek philosophy falls between 550 and 430 B.C.; the books of Hosea and Amos date from before the fall of Samaria in 721 B.C.

pires, not only held its independent national existence, and maintained itself unaffected in the highest degree by world influences, speaking its own language, practising its own customs, observing its own laws, proudly regarding itself as a race destined to highest distinction and even to world-dominion, but even at the moment of its political extinction held aloft the banner of national supremacy and undying hope. Nor have its expectations been falsified. Scattered to the four winds of heaven, trodden down as the mire of the streets, persecuted in strange lands, wandering from end to end of a continent in search of a resting-place, it has remained one in all that constituted its unity before its independence was lost. Even in this cosmopolitan age, when men of every nationality are becoming daily more and more citizens of the world, and when the modern Jew of Britain, or America, or Germany, or France, makes it his poor boast that he is an Englishman, an American, a German, or a Frenchman, his very speech bewrayeth him, and he is classed as a member of the one race which is the scorn of many, the dread of some, the wonder of all. For, as a nation or race, the Jewish people lives on, and has a definite influence on the events of contemporary history; and this though it is a nation without a home and without independent political existence. It is a great thing to have the control, to the extent that they enjoy, of the money which is intimately bound up with the prosecution of any undertaking, literary, commercial, or philanthropic, to be the arbiters of war or peace, the masters of the Exchange. The modern movement against the Jews in some parts of Europe, though it may have its root in the very thing we have indicated, shows also that the influence of this wonderful race is not merely monetary but intellectual. Even if it is