open, but which was written in with great discretion.  The family charged with bearing the ark and watching over the portable archives, being near the book and having the control of it, very soon became important.  From hence, however, the institution which was to control the future did not come.  The Hebrew priest did not differ much from the other priests of antiquity.  The character which essentially distinguishes Israel among theocratic peoples is, that its priesthood has always been subordinated to individual inspiration.  Besides its priests, each wandering tribe had its nabi or prophet, a sort of living oracle who was consulted for the solution of obscure questions supposed to require a high degree of clairvoyance.  The nabis of Israel, organized in groups or schools, had great influence.  Defenders of the ancient democratic spirit, enemies of the rich, opposed to all political organization, and to whatsoever might draw Israel into the paths of other nations, they were the true authors of the religious preeminence of the Jewish people.  Very early they announced unlimited hopes, and when the people, in part the victims of their impolitic counsels, had been crushed by the Assyrian power, they proclaimed that a kingdom without bounds was reserved for them, that one day Jerusalem would be the capital of the whole world, and the human race become Jews.  Jerusalem and its temples appeared to them as a city placed on the summit of a mountain, toward which all people should turn, as an oracle whence the universal law should proceed, as the centre of an ideal kingdom, in which the human race, set at rest by Israel, should find again the joys of Eden.[3]

[Footnote 1:  I remind the reader that this word means here simply the people who speak or have spoken one of the languages called Semitic.  Such a designation is entirely defective; but it is one of those words, like “Gothic architecture,” “Arabian numerals,” which we must preserve to be understood, even after we have demonstrated the error that they imply.]

[Footnote 2:  I Sam. x. 25.]

[Footnote 3:  Isa. ii. 1-4, and especially chaps. xl., and following, lx., and following; Micah iv. 1, and following.  It must be recollected that the second part of the book of Isaiah, beginning at chap. xl., is not by Isaiah.]

Mystical utterances already made themselves heard, tending to exalt the martyrdom and celebrate the power of the “Man of Sorrows.”  Respecting one of those sublime sufferers, who, like Jeremiah, stained the streets of Jerusalem with their blood, one of the inspired wrote a song upon the sufferings and triumph of the “servant of God,” in which all the prophetic force of the genius of Israel seemed concentrated.[1] “For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground:  he hath no form nor comeliness.  He is despised and rejected of men; and we hid, as it were, our faces from him; he was despised, and