yria or
Rome. A little later she seemed about to rival the Phenicians in
commerce. About the same time she

"advanced as far as the Greeks before Socrates towards producing an
independent science or philosophy."[19]

But she found herself content with none of these _roles_. She had a higher
part assigned her in the drama of history, to which her secret instincts
resistlessly drew her. Her predominant characteristic was an intense
religiousness. Everything in the life of her people took on a serious and
devout tone. Patriotism was identified with piety. Her statesmen were
reformers, idealists, whose orations were sermons, like the speeches of
Gladstone in the Midlothian campaign, dealing with politics in the light
of eternal principles. Legislation was developed through the "judgments"
of priestly oracles. Poetry lighted her flames at the altar. Philosophy
busied itself with ethics. The Muse of History was the Spirit of Holiness.
The nation's ambitions were aspirations. Her heroes grew to be saints. The
divine became to her, not the true or the beautiful, but the good. She
evidently had, as Matthew Arnold said of John Wesley, "a genius for
godliness."

2. _Israel's literature became thus a religious literature._

Her histories were written for edification. They present the past of the
people in such light as to inculcate virtue and inspire piety. Her poems
are songs of pure love, like Canticles; or dramas whose plot lies in the
problem of evil, like Job; or hymns in which the soul seeks communion with
God. The Psalter is the hymnal of the temple choir at Jerusalem. The
prophets are preachers of righteousness, personal, social, political. Even
the writings of her sages or philosophers are almost wholly ethical and
religious. No other people's literature is so intensely and pervasively
religious. Other nations have religious writings as a part of their
general literature. Israel's whole literary life was sacred. There is
scarcely a book left by her to which we may not go to feed religion.[20]

3. _Israel's literature presents us, in the various moods and tenses of
her life, with the various phases of religion._

The glory of a truly National Church is that it takes up into itself every
form of spiritual and ethical consciousness within the nation, and
exhibits in each successive school of thought, in each movement for a
nobler social life, a phase of true religion. This is the glory of Israel.
Relig