energy that transformed it. Where else is
there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and
law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made
one growth--where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual
store at the very time when they are hated with a hatred as fierce as
the forest fires that chase the wild beast from his covert? There is a
fable of the Roman, that swimming to save his life he held the roll of
his writings between his teeth and saved them from the waters. But how
much more than that is true of our race? They struggled to keep their
place among the nations like heroes--yea, when the hand was hacked off,
they clung with their teeth; but when the plow and the harrow had
passed over the last visible signs of their national covenant, and the
fruitfulness of their land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and
planters, they said, 'The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting
habitation--lasting because movable--so that it may be carried from
generation to generation, and our sons unborn may be rich in the things
that have been, and possess a hope built on an unchangeable
foundation.' They said it and they wrought it, though often breathing
with scant life, as in a coffin, or as lying wounded amid a heap of
slain. Hooted and scared like the unknown dog, the Hebrew made himself
envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of them to fill the bath
of Gentile luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it; his dispersed
race was a new Phoenicia working the mines of Greece and carrying their
products to the world. The native spirit of our tradition was not to
stand still, but to use records as a seed and draw out the compressed
virtues of law and prophecy; and while the Gentile, who had said, 'What
is yours is ours, and no longer yours,' was reading the letter of our
law as a dark inscription, or was turning its parchments into
shoe-soles for an army rabid with lust and cruelty, our Masters were
still enlarging and illuminating with fresh-fed interpretation. But the
dispersion was wide, the yoke of oppression was a spiked torture as
well as a load; the exile was forced afar among brutish people, where
the consciousness of his race was no clearer to him than the light of
the sun to our fathers in the Roman persecution, who had their
hiding-place in a cave, and knew not that it was day save by the dimmer
burning of their candles. What wonder that multitudes o