s of
making destiny, perhaps, less unfavourable--and an act of more fervent
worship--a renewal of faith in Jehovah, to whose hands the nation was
intrusted more solemnly and irrevocably than ever.

[Sidenote: Beginnings of the Church.]

This pious experiment failed most signally. Jerusalem was taken, the
Temple destroyed, and the flower of the people carried into exile. The
effect of failure, however, was not to discredit the Law and the
Covenant, now once for all adopted by the unshakable Jews. On the
contrary, when they returned from exile they re-established the
theocracy with greater rigour than ever, adding all the minute
observances, ritualistic and social, enshrined in Leviticus. Israel
became an ecclesiastical community. The Temple, half fortress, half
sanctuary, resounded with perpetual psalms. Piety was fed on a sense at
once of consecration and of guidance. All was prescribed, and to fulfil
the Law, precisely because it involved so complete and, as the world
might say, so arbitrary a regimen, became a precious sacrifice, a
continual act of religion.

[Sidenote: Bigotry turned into a principle.]

Dogmas are at their best when nobody denies them, for then their
falsehood sleeps, like that of an unconscious metaphor, and their moral
function is discharged instinctively. They count and are not defined,
and the side of them that is not deceptive is the one that comes
forward. What was condemnable in the Jews was not that they asserted the
divinity of their law, for that they did with substantial sincerity and
truth. Their crime is to have denied the equal prerogative of other
nations' laws and deities, for this they did, not from critical insight
or intellectual scruples, but out of pure bigotry, conceit, and
stupidity. They did not want other nations also to have a god. The moral
government of the world, which the Jews are praised for having first
asserted, did not mean for them that nature shows a generic benevolence
toward life and reason wherever these arise. Such a moral government
might have been conceived by a pagan philosopher and was not taught in
Israel until, selfishness having been outgrown, the birds and the
heathen were also placed under divine protection. What the moral
government of things meant when it was first asserted was that Jehovah
expressly directed the destinies of heathen nations and the course of
nature itself for the final glorification of the Jews.

No civilised people had ever h