India. Apparently its local features, metaphysical and ascetic,
have impeded its progress--it lacks the simplicity of Buddhism.

+1108+. _Judaism._ Judaism stands on the border line--it was a cult that
approached the position of a church, yet failed to reach it. Its line of
movement differed _in toto_ from those described above. It had no
philosophy, no asceticism, no secret societies, and it did not rely on
its ethical code. It was essentially religious, in theory a theocracy,
in form a national cult. The steps by which the old polytheistic
Israelite nation passed into the monotheistic Judaism can be traced
historically, but the impulse to the movement was a part of the genius
of the people and cannot be further explained. The leaders of the small
body of people that gathered at Jerusalem in the sixth century, after
the break-up of the year 586, were animated by a patriotic devotion to
the national deity; without political autonomy, merely a province of the
Persian empire, the sole interests possible for the people were racial
and religious, and these isolated them from the neighboring peoples.
Those who remained in Babylonia (where they were prosperous and
comfortable) were similarly isolated, devoted themselves to their own
development, and their religious attitude was the same as that of the
Palestinian community. Distance from the temple led to gatherings in
various places for worship (synagogues).

The Jews thus became a nation organized under religious law, with an
institution devoted to voluntary communal worship, and offering
salvation, at first for this life only, but later (from the second
century B.C. onward) for the future life also--these were elements of a
church. But in two points this cult fell short of the complete church
idea: the business of a church is wholly and solely religious, and the
Jewish nation was organized not only for religion, but also for
commerce, politics, and war;[2037] and the synagogue and the
temple-service were not free to all the world--only Jews and
proselytes[2038] might take part in them. Any religious body, it is
true, may properly define the conditions of entrance into it; but here
the restriction was national--the synagogal cult, individualistic and
simply devotional as it purported to be, was a part of the national
system, and its membership depended almost exclusively on the accident
of birth. Proselytes, indeed, formed an exception--they came in of their
own choice--bu