as a new quarry from which he might obtain the human materials
of his future armies, and also as an arena or pocket theatre, in which
he could organize and discipline these armies secure from jealous
observation.

[26] Here the pupil will naturally object--was not Judaea an Asiatic
land? And did not Judaea act upon Europe? Doubtless; and in the sublimest
way by which it is possible for man to act upon man; not only through
the highest and noblest part of man's nature, but (as most truly it may
be affirmed) literally creating, in a practical sense, that nature. For,
to say nothing of the sublime idea of Redemption as mystically involved
in the types and prophecies of Jewish prophets, and in the very
ceremonies of the Jewish religion, what was the very highest ideal of
God which man--philosophic man even--had attained, compared with that of
the very meanest Jew? It is false to say that amongst the philosophers
of Greece or Rome the Polytheistic creed was rejected. No Pagan
philosopher ever adopted, ever even conceived, the sublime of the Jewish
God--as a being not merely of essential unity, but as deriving from that
unity the moral relations of a governor and a retributive judge towards
human creatures. So that Judaea bore an office for the human race of a
most awful and mysterious sanctity. But (and partly for that reason) the
civil and social relations of Judaea to the human race were less than
nothing. And thence arose the intolerant scorn of such writers as
Tacitus for the Christians, whom, of course, they viewed as Jews, and
nothing _but_ Jews. Thus far they were right--that, as a nation, valued
upon the only scale known to politicians, the Jews brought nothing at
all to the common fund of knowledge or civilization. One element of
knowledge, however, the Jews did bring, though at that time unknown, and
long after, for want of historic criticism in the history of chronologic
researches, viz., a chronology far superior to that of the Septuagint,
as will be shown farther on, and far superior to the main guides of
Paganism. But the reason why this superiority of chronology will, after
all, but little avail the general student is, that it relates merely to
the Assyrian or Persian princes in their intercourse with the courts of
Jerusalem or of Samaria.

[27] Juba, King of Mauritania, during the struggle of Caesar and Pompey.

[28] Which clannish feeling, be it observed, always depends for its life
and intensity upon the