ahomet, when he stole all
his great ideas from the Mosaic and Christian revelations, found it
inevitable to add one principle unknown to either: this was a religious
motive for perpetual war of aggression, and such a principle he
discovered in the imaginary duty of summary proselytism. No instruction
was required. It was sufficient for the convert that, with or without
sincerity, under terror of a sword at his throat, he spoke the words
aloud which disowned all other faith than in Allah and Mahomet his
prophet. It was sufficient for the soldier that he heard of a nation
denying or ignoring Mahomet, to justify any atrocity of invasive
warfare. But the Jews had no such commission--a proselyte needed more
evidences of assent than simply to bawl out a short formula of words,
and he who refused to become a proselyte was no object of persecution.
Some nations have forced their languages upon others as badges of
servitude. But the Romans were so far from treating _their_ language in
this way, that they compelled barbarous nations on their frontier to pay
for a license to use the Latin tongue. And with much more reason did the
Jews, instead of wishing to obtrude their sublime religion upon
foreigners, expect that all who valued it should manifest their value by
coming to Jerusalem, by seeking instruction from the doctors of the law,
and by worshipping in the outer court of the Temple.

Such was the prodigious state of separation from a Mahometan principle
of fanatical proselytism in which the Jews were placed from the very
first. One small district only was to be cleared of its ancient
idolatrous, and probably desperately demoralized, tribes. Even this
purification it was not intended should be instant; and upon the
following reason, partly unveiled by God and partly left to an
integration, viz., that in the case of so sudden a desolation the wild
beasts and noxious serpents would have encroached too much on the human
population. So much is expressed, and probably the sequel foreseen was,
that the Jews would have lapsed into a wild hunting race, and have
outworn that ceremonial propensity which fitted them for a civil life,
which formed them into a hive in which the great work of God in Shiloh,
His probationary Temple or His glorious Temple and service at Jerusalem,
operated as the mysterious instinct of a queen bee, to compress and
organize the whole society into a cohesion like this of life. Here,
perhaps, lay the reason for