d of dispersion of
cultures of a given centre shows that all races have been great
borrowers, and usually when one art, industry, or custom has been
thoroughly established, it may continue to influence other races after
the race that gave the product has passed away, or other nations, while
the original nation has perished.

_The Hebrews Made a Permanent Contribution to World
Civilization_.--Tradition, pretty well supported by history, shows that
Abraham came out of Ur of Chaldea about 1,900 years before Christ, and
with his family moved northward into {165} Haran for larger pasture for
his flocks on the grassy plains of Mesopotamia. Thence he proceeded
westward to Palestine, made a trip to Egypt, and returned to the upper
reaches of the Jordan. Here his tribe grew and flourished, and
finally, after the manner of pastoral peoples, moved into Egypt for
corn in time of drought. There his people lived for several hundred
years, attached to the Egyptian nation, and adopting many phases of the
Egyptian civilization. When he turned his back upon his people in
Babylon, he left polytheism behind. He obtained conception of one
supreme being, ruler and creator of the universe, who could not be
shown in the form of an image made by man.

This was not the first time in the history of the human race when
nations had approximated the idea of one supreme God above all gods and
men, but it was the first time the conception that He was the only God
and pure monotheism obtained the supremacy. No doubt, in the history
of the Hebrew development this idea came as a gradual growth rather
than as an instantaneous inspiration. In fact, all nations who have
reached any advanced degree of religious development have approached
the idea of monotheism, but it remained for the Hebrews to put it in
practice in their social life and civil polity. It became the great
central controlling thought of national life.

Compared with the great empires of Babylon and Nineveh and Egypt, the
Hebrew nation was small, crude, barbarous, insignificant, but the idea
of one god controlling all, who passed in conception from a god of
authority, imminence, and revenge, to a god of justice and
righteousness, who controlled the affairs of men, developed the Hebrew
concept of human relations. It led them to develop a legal-ethical
system which became the foundation of the Hebrew commonwealth and
established a code of laws for the government of the nation, which