left in a state of irreconcilable hostility with all their neighbors.
They had been commanded to extirpate some of the most idolatrous tribes,
and the execution of the divine will had seldom been retarded by the
weakness of humanity.

With the other nations they were forbidden to contract any marriages or
alliances; and the prohibition of receiving them into the congregation,
which in some cases was perpetual, almost always extended to the third,
to the seventh, or even to the tenth generation. The obligation of
preaching to the Gentiles the faith of Moses had never been inculcated
as a precept of the law, nor were the Jews inclined to impose it on
themselves as a voluntary duty.

In the admission of new citizens, that unsocial people was actuated by
the selfish vanity of the Greeks, rather than by the generous policy of
Rome. The descendants of Abraham were flattered by the opinion that
they alone were the heirs of the covenant, and they were apprehensive of
diminishing the value of their inheritance by sharing it too easily with
the strangers of the earth. A larger acquaintance with mankind extended
their knowledge without correcting their prejudices; and whenever the
God of Israel acquired any new votaries, he was much more indebted to
the inconstant humor of polytheism than to the active zeal of his own
missionaries. [11] The religion of Moses seems to be instituted for
a particular country as well as for a single nation; and if a strict
obedience had been paid to the order, that every male, three times in
the year, should present himself before the Lord Jehovah, it would have
been impossible that the Jews could ever have spread themselves beyond
the narrow limits of the promised land. [12] That obstacle was indeed
removed by the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem; but the
most considerable part of the Jewish religion was involved in its
destruction; and the Pagans, who had long wondered at the strange report
of an empty sanctuary, [13] were at a loss to discover what could be
the object, or what could be the instruments, of a worship which was
destitute of temples and of altars, of priests and of sacrifices.

Yet even in their fallen state, the Jews, still asserting their lofty
and exclusive privileges, shunned, instead of courting, the society of
strangers. They still insisted with inflexible rigor on those parts
of the law which it was in their power to practise. Their peculiar
distinctions of days, of me