by the minority.  Notwithstanding all their enormous defects, hard, egotistical, scoffing, cruel, narrow, subtle, and sophistical, the Jewish people are the authors of the finest movement of disinterested enthusiasm which history records.  Opposition always makes the glory of a country.  The greatest men of a nation are those whom it puts to death.  Socrates was the glory of the Athenians, who would not suffer him to live amongst them.  Spinoza was the greatest Jew of modern times, and the synagogue expelled him with ignominy.  Jesus was the glory of the people of Israel, who crucified him.

[Footnote 1:  Yacna, xiii. 24:  Theopompus, in Plut., De Iside et Osiride, sec. 47; Minokhired, a passage published in the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft, i., p. 263.]

[Footnote 2:  Virg., Ecl. iv.; Servius, at v. 4 of this Eclogue; Nigidius, quoted by Servius, at v. 10.]

[Footnote 3:  Book iii., 97-817.]

[Footnote 4:  Esther vi. 13, vii. 10, viii. 7, 11-17, ix. 1-22; and in the apocryphal parts, ix. 10, 11, xiv. 13, and following, xvi. 20, 24.]

[Footnote 5:  Eccl. i. 11, ii. 16, 18-24, iii. 19-22, iv. 8, 15, 16, v. 17, 18, vi. 3, 6, viii. 15, ix. 9, 10.]

A gigantic dream haunted for centuries the Jewish people, constantly renewing its youth in its decrepitude.  A stranger to the theory of individual recompense, which Greece diffused under the name of the immortality of the soul, Judea concentrated all its power of love and desire upon the national future.  She thought she possessed divine promises of a boundless future; and as the bitter reality, from the ninth century before our era, gave more and more the dominion of the world to physical force, and brutally crushed these aspirations, she took refuge in the union of the most impossible ideas, and attempted the strangest gyrations.  Before the captivity, when all the earthly hopes of the nation had become weakened by the separation of the northern tribes, they dreamt of the restoration of the house of David, the reconciliation of the two divisions of the people, and the triumph of theocracy and the worship of Jehovah over idolatry.  At the epoch of the captivity, a poet, full of harmony, saw the splendor of a future Jerusalem, of which the peoples and the distant isles should be tributaries, under colors so charming, that one might say a glimpse of the visions of Jesus had reached him at a distance of six centuries.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Isaiah lx. &c.]

The victory of Cyrus seemed at one time to realize all that had been hoped.  The grave disciples of the Avesta and the adorers of Jehovah believed themselves brothers.  Persia had begun by banishing the multiple devas, and by transforming them into demons (divs), to draw from the old Arian imaginations (essentially naturalistic) a species of Monotheism.  The prophetic tone of many of the teachings of Iran had much analogy with certain compositions