Greek was a flowering time for genius. In return
for the liberty it then enjoyed, what a company of thinkers the
Mind led forth? There was a glory for every excellence, and a
perfection so absolute that in everything but war even the Roman
has stooped to imitation. A Greek is now the model of the orators
in the Forum; listen, and in every Roman song you will hear the
rhythm of the Greek; if a Roman opens his mouth speaking wisely
of moralities, or abstractions, or of the mysteries of nature,
he is either a plagiarist or the disciple of some school which had
a Greek for its founder. In nothing but war, I say again, has Rome
a claim to originality. Her games and spectacles are Greek inventions,
dashed with blood to gratify the ferocity of her rabble; her religion,
if such it may be called, is made up of contributions from the
faiths of all other peoples; her most venerated gods are from
Olympus--even her Mars, and, for that matter, the Jove she much
magnifies. So it happens, O my son, that of the whole world our
Israel alone can dispute the superiority of the Greek, and with
him contest the palm of original genius.

"To the excellences of other peoples the egotism of a Roman is
a blindfold, impenetrable as his breastplate. Oh, the ruthless
robbers! Under their trampling the earth trembles like a floor
beaten with flails. Along with the rest we are fallen--alas that
I should say it to you, my son! They have our highest places, and
the holiest, and the end no man can tell; but this I know--they
may reduce Judea as an almond broken with hammers, and devour
Jerusalem, which is the oil and sweetness thereof; yet the glory
of the men of Israel will remain a light in the heavens overhead
out of reach: for their history is the history of God, who wrote
with their hands, spake with their tongues, and was himself in all
the good they did, even the least; who dwelt with them, a Lawgiver
on Sinai, a Guide in the wilderness, in war a Captain, in government
a King; who once and again pushed back the curtains of the
pavilion which is his resting-place, intolerably bright, and,
as a man speaking to men, showed them the right, and the way
to happiness, and how they should live, and made them promises
binding the strength of his Almightiness with covenants sworn to
everlastingly. O my son, could it be that they with whom Jehovah
thus dwelt, an awful familiar, derived nothing from him?--that
in their lives and deeds the common human quali