rom the Orient to the Occident, from Europe to America, this slow
weaving of the thoughts, tastes and beliefs of people of widely
different races has been going on, and forms, indeed, a history by
itself.

The forerunner and prophet of subsequent Christian literature is the
Hebrew. It is not, however, the first complete written literature, as
it was supposed to be until a few years ago.

The oldest Semitic texts reach back to the time of Anemurabi, who was
contemporaneous with Abraham, five hundred years before Moses. These
Semites possessed a literature and script which they largely borrowed
from the older non-Semitic races in the localities where the posterity
of Thare and Abraham settled.

Recent researches in Assyria, Egypt and Babylonia has brought this
older literature and civilization to light; a literature from which the
Hebrews themselves largely drew. Three thousand years before Abraham
emigrated from Chaldea there were sacred poems in the East not unlike
the psalms of David, as well as heroic poetry describing the creation,
and written in nearly the same order as the Pentateuch of Moses.

The story of the Deluge, and other incidents recorded in the Old
Testament, together with numerous legends, were known and treasured by
the Ancients as sacred traditions from the earliest ages of the world.

We learn from St. Paul that "Moses was skilled in all the knowledge of
the Egyptians." He must therefore have been familiar not only with the
ancient poems and sacred writings, but also with the scientific,
historical, legal and didactic literature of the times, from which, no
doubt, he borrowed all that was best in the Mosaic Code that he drew up
for the Chosen People of God. This old literature Moses confirmed and
purified, even as Christ at a later period, confirmed and elevated all
that was best in the Hebrew belief. Hence from these Oriental scholars
we learn that the Hebrew was only one of several languages which
enjoyed at different times a development of the highest culture and
polish, although the teaching of the old Rabbis was that the Bible was
the first set of historical and religious books to be written. Such was
the current belief for many ages; and while this view of the Scriptures
is now known to be untrue, they are, in fact, the most ancient and
complete writings now in existence, although the discovery in
Jerusalem, thirty-five or forty years ago, of the inscriptions of
Siloe, take us back about ei