ilings correspondent. They
had, like all other races, their champions of the Light, their
Prophets and wise Rabbis; and in ages of darkness their stiff
necked fierce materialism incased in dogma and inthroned in high
places in the national religion. Their history has been lifted
to a bad eminence,--bad for them and the rest of us,--by the
ignorance of the last two millenniums; in reality, that history,
sanely understood, and not gathered too much from their own
records, amply explains their failings and their virtues, and
should leave us not unduly admiring, nor unfraternally the
reverse. They were human; which means, subject to human
duality, to cycles of light, and cycles of darkness. The
centuries after the sixth B.C. were, as we have seen, a cycle of
growing darkness for most of the world. The position of the
Jews, a small people surrounded by great ones, and therefore
always liable to be trampled on, had intensified their national
feeling to an extraordinary pitch; and their religion was the
one lasting bond of their nationality. So, at the beginning of
the Christian era, they were notoriously the most difficult
people to govern in the Roman world. The passing of the Egyptian
Mysteries had left those Egyptians who still were Egyptian
sullenly fanatical; but the reaction from ancient greatness kept
that fanaticism aloof,--the energies were dormant: Egypt,
thoroughly conquered, turned her face from the world, and hoped
for nothing. But the Jews maintained an inextinguishable hope;
they nourished on it a fighting spirit which entered fiercely
into the religion that was for them the one and only truth, and
that lifted them in their own estimation high above the rest of
mankind. Romans and Egyptians alike worshiped the Gods, though
they called them by different names; but the Jews abhorred the
Gods. The Maker of Sirius and Canopus and the far limits of the
galaxy was a good Jew like themselves, their peculiar property;
He had his earthly headquarters in Jerusalem; spoke, I suppose,
only Hebrew, and considered other languages gibberish; of
all this earth, was only interested in a tiny corner at the
south-east end of the Mediterrancan; and of all the millions of
humanity only in the million or two of his Chosen People. I say
at once that, considering their history, and the universal
decline of the Mysteries, and the gathering darkness of the age,
there is nothing surprising in their attitude. Much oppressi