And even skepticism must pause before the miracle of the continued existence of this strange people, wading through the ages, bearing on their shoulders the burden of their great trust, and pressing forward under the force of a perpetual and irresistible impulse.  The speech that may be heard to-day in the synagogues of Chicago and Melbourne resounded two thousand years ago in the streets of Rome; and, at a still earlier period, it could be heard in the palaces of Babylon and the shops of Thebes—­in Tyre, in Sidon, in Gades, in Palmyra, in Nineveh.  How many nations have perished, how many languages have ceased to exist, how many splendid civilizations have crumbled into ruin, bow many temples and towers and towns have gone down to dust since the sublime frenzy of monotheism first seized this extraordinary people!  All their kindred nomadic tribes are gone; their land of promise is in the hands of strangers; but Judaism, with its offspring, Christianity, is taking possession of the habitable world; and the continuous life of one people—­one poor, obscure, and wretched people—­spans the tremendous gulf between “Ptah-hotep” and this nineteenth century.

If the Spirit of which the universe is but an expression—­of whose frame the stars are the infinite molecules—­can be supposed ever to interfere with the laws of matter and reach down into the doings of men, would it not be to save from the wreck and waste of time the most sublime fruit of the civilization of the drowned Atlantis—­a belief in the one, only, just God, the father of all life, the imposer of all moral obligations?

CHAPTER VII.

THE ORIGIN OF OUR ALPHABET

One of the most marvellous inventions for the advancement of mankind is the phonetic alphabet, or a system of signs representing the sounds of human speech.  Without it our present civilization could scarcely have been possible.

No solution of the origin of our European alphabet has yet been obtained:  we can trace it back from nation to nation, and form to form, until we reach the Egyptians, and the archaic forms of the Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Cushites, but beyond this the light fails us.

The Egyptians spoke of their hieroglyphic system of writing not as their own invention, but as “the language of the gods.” (Lenormant and Cheval, “Anc.  Hist. of the East,” vol. ii., p. 208.) “The gods” were, doubtless, their highly civilized ancestors—­the people of Atlantis—­who, as we shall hereafter see, became the gods of many of the Mediterranean races.

“According to the Phoenicians, the art of writing was invented by Taautus, or Taut, ‘whom the Egyptians call Thouth,’ and the Egyptians said it was invented by Thouth, or Thoth, otherwise called ’the first Hermes,’ in which we clearly see that both the Phoenicians and Egyptians referred the invention to a period older than their own separate political existence, and to an older nation, from which both peoples received it.” (Baldwin’s “Prehistoric Nations,” p. 91.)