And this Law, it must be remarked, was entirely social and moral.  It was the work of men penetrated with a high ideal of the present life, and believing that they had found the best means of realizing it.  The conviction of all was, that the Thora, well observed, could not fail to give perfect felicity.  This Thora has nothing in common with the Greek or Roman “Laws,” which, occupying themselves with scarcely anything but abstract right, entered little into questions of private happiness and morality.  We feel beforehand that the results which will proceed from it will be of a social, and not a political order, that the work at which this people labors is a kingdom of God, not a civil republic; a universal institution, not a nationality or a country.

Notwithstanding numerous failures, Israel admirably sustained this vocation.  A series of pious men, Ezra, Nehemiah, Onias, the Maccabees, consumed with zeal for the Law, succeeded each other in the defense of the ancient institutions.  The idea that Israel was a holy people, a tribe chosen by God and bound to Him by covenant, took deeper and firmer root.  An immense expectation filled their souls.  All Indo-European antiquity had placed paradise in the beginning; all its poets had wept a vanished golden age.  Israel placed the age of gold in the future.  The perennial poesy of religious souls, the Psalms, blossomed from this exalted piety, with their divine and melancholy harmony.  Israel became truly and specially the people of God, while around it the pagan religions were more and more reduced, in Persia and Babylonia, to an official charlatanism, in Egypt and Syria to a gross idolatry, and in the Greek and Roman world to mere parade.  That which the Christian martyrs did in the first centuries of our era, that which the victims of persecuting orthodoxy have done, even in the bosom of Christianity, up to our time, the Jews did during the two centuries which preceded the Christian era.  They were a living protest against superstition and religious materialism.  An extraordinary movement of ideas, ending in the most opposite results, made of them, at this epoch, the most striking and original people in the world.  Their dispersion along all the coast of the Mediterranean, and the use of the Greek language, which they adopted when out of Palestine, prepared the way for a propagandism, of which ancient societies, divided into small nationalities, had never offered a single example.

Up to the time of the Maccabees, Judaism, in spite of its persistence in announcing that it would one day be the religion of the human race, had had the characteristic of all the other worships of antiquity, it was a worship of the family and the tribe.  The Israelite thought, indeed, that his worship was the best, and spoke with contempt of strange gods; but he believed also that the religion of the true God was made for himself alone.  Only when a man entered into the Jewish family did he embrace the