, it accepted all
governments which permitted it to practise freely its worship and
follow its usages. Israel will henceforward have no other guidance
than that of its religious enthusiasts, no other enemies than those of
the Divine unity, no other country than its Law.

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.