The poetry of the soul—­faith, liberty, virtue, devotion—­made their appearance in the world with the two great races which, in one sense, have made humanity, viz., the Indo-European and the Semitic races.  The first religious intuitions of the Indo-European race were essentially naturalistic.  But it was a profound and moral naturalism, a loving embrace of Nature by man, a delicious poetry, full of the sentiment of the Infinite—­the principle, in fine, of all that which the Germanic and Celtic genius, of that which a Shakespeare and a Goethe should express in later times.  It was neither theology nor moral philosophy—­it was a state of melancholy, it was tenderness, it was imagination; it was, more than all, earnestness, the essential condition of morals and religion.  The faith of humanity, however, could not come from thence, because these ancient forms of worships had great difficulty in detaching themselves from Polytheism, and could not attain to a very clear symbol.  Brahminism has only survived to the present day by virtue of the astonishing faculty of conservation which India seems to possess.  Buddhism failed in all its approaches toward the West.  Druidism remained a form exclusively national, and without universal capacity.  The Greek attempts at reform, Orpheism, the Mysteries, did not suffice to give a solid aliment to the soul.  Persia alone succeeded in making a dogmatic religion, almost Monotheistic, and skilfully organized; but it is very possible that this organization itself was but an imitation, or borrowed.  At all events, Persia has not converted the world; she herself, on the contrary, was converted when she saw the flag of the Divine unity as proclaimed by Mohammedanism appear on her frontiers.

It is the Semitic race[1] which has the glory of having made the religion of humanity.  Far beyond the confines of history, resting under his tent, free from the taint of a corrupted world, the Bedouin patriarch prepared the faith of mankind.  A strong antipathy against the voluptuous worships of Syria, a grand simplicity of ritual, the complete absence of temples, and the idol reduced to insignificant theraphim, constituted his superiority.  Among all the tribes of the nomadic Semites, that of the Beni-Israel was already chosen for immense destinies.  Ancient relations with Egypt, whence perhaps resulted some purely material ingredients, did but augment their repulsion to idolatry.  A “Law” or Thora, very anciently written on tables of stone, and which they attributed to their great liberator Moses, had become the code of Monotheism, and contained, as compared with the institutions of Egypt and Chaldea, powerful germs of social equality and morality.  A chest or portable ark, having staples on each side to admit of bearing poles, constituted all their religious materiel; there were collected the sacred objects of the nation, its relics, its souvenirs, and, lastly, the “book,"[2] the journal of the tribe, always