“advanced as far as the Greeks before Socrates towards producing an
   independent science or philosophy."[19]

But she found herself content with none of these roles.  She had a higher part assigned her in the drama of history, to which her secret instincts resistlessly drew her.  Her predominant characteristic was an intense religiousness.  Everything in the life of her people took on a serious and devout tone.  Patriotism was identified with piety.  Her statesmen were reformers, idealists, whose orations were sermons, like the speeches of Gladstone in the Midlothian campaign, dealing with politics in the light of eternal principles.  Legislation was developed through the “judgments” of priestly oracles.  Poetry lighted her flames at the altar.  Philosophy busied itself with ethics.  The Muse of History was the Spirit of Holiness.  The nation’s ambitions were aspirations.  Her heroes grew to be saints.  The divine became to her, not the true or the beautiful, but the good.  She evidently had, as Matthew Arnold said of John Wesley, “a genius for godliness.”

2. Israel’s literature became thus a religious literature.

Her histories were written for edification.  They present the past of the people in such light as to inculcate virtue and inspire piety.  Her poems are songs of pure love, like Canticles; or dramas whose plot lies in the problem of evil, like Job; or hymns in which the soul seeks communion with God.  The Psalter is the hymnal of the temple choir at Jerusalem.  The prophets are preachers of righteousness, personal, social, political.  Even the writings of her sages or philosophers are almost wholly ethical and religious.  No other people’s literature is so intensely and pervasively religious.  Other nations have religious writings as a part of their general literature.  Israel’s whole literary life was sacred.  There is scarcely a book left by her to which we may not go to feed religion.[20]

3. Israel’s literature presents us, in the various moods and tenses of her life, with the various phases of religion.

The glory of a truly National Church is that it takes up into itself every form of spiritual and ethical consciousness within the nation, and exhibits in each successive school of thought, in each movement for a nobler social life, a phase of true religion.  This is the glory of Israel.  Religion never separated itself into an institution apart from the State.

There was no Jewish Church, of which Dean Stanley wrote the history.  Church and State were one.  Sacred and secular history flowed in one common stream.  The history of Israel was the history of Judaism.  Its choicest literature formed its sacred writings.  Religion was never narrowed to a theory, an institution, an “ism,” a sect, a school.  It was as generous and as rich as the broad, free life of the nation.  Every factor essential to a noble religion was thus supplied from the sound and healthy life of the people.