importance in the Persian
empire, and spread from there to the Greek colonies in Asia, and
thence to Europe, where it has maintained itself with slight variation
to the present day.

A _talent_[13] was divided into sixty _minae_, a mina into sixty
_shekels_. Here we have again the Babylonian sexagesimal system, a
system which owes its origin and popularity, I believe, to the fact
that _sixty_ has the greatest number of divisors. Shekel was
translated into Greek by _Stater_, and an Athenian gold stater, like
the Persian gold stater, down to the times of Croesus, Darius, and
Alexander, was the sixtieth part of a mina of gold, not very far
therefore from our sovereign. The proportion of silver to gold was
fixed as thirteen or thirteen and a third to one; and if the weight of
a silver shekel was made as thirteen to ten, such a coin would
correspond very nearly to our florin.[14] Half a silver shekel was a
_drachma_, and this was therefore the true ancestor of our shilling.

Again you may say that any attempt at fixing the relative value of
silver and gold is, and always has been, a great mistake. Still it
shows how closely the world is held together, and how, for good or for
evil, we are what we are, not so much by ourselves as by the toil and
moil of those who came before us, our true intellectual ancestors,
whatever the blood may have been composed of that ran through their
veins, or the bones which formed the rafters of their skulls.

And if it is true, with regard to religion, that no one could
understand it and appreciate its full purport without knowing its
origin and growth, that is, without knowing something of what the
cuneiform inscriptions of Mesopotamia, the hieroglyphic and hieratic
texts of Egypt, and the historical monuments of Phoenicia and Persia
can alone reveal to us, it is equally true with regard to all the
other elements that constitute the whole of our intellectual life. If
we are Jewish or Semitic in our religion, we are _Greek_ in our
philosophy, _Roman_ in our politics, and _Saxon_ in our morality; and
it follows that a knowledge of the history of the Greeks, Romans, and
Saxons, or of the flow of civilization from Greece to Italy, and
through Germany to these isles, forms an essential element in what is
called a liberal, that is, an historical and rational education.

But then it might be said, Let this be enough. Let us know by all
means all that deserves to be known about our real spiritual a