mitic race is to be sought, most scholars now answer that we
must seek it in Arabia. From this isolated land the Semitic
dispersion spread in every direction, till Semitic language and
customs filled the earth from the south of Arabia to the north of
Syria, and from the mountains of Iran to the Mediterranean, and far
along the northern shores of Africa; of Babylonia and Assyria, where
Semitic culture and religion assumed at the dawn of human history a
very special and peculiar form, we have already spoken. We have now
to speak of Semitic religion as found in the lands bordering on the
eastern Mediterranean in a more original form. The Semitic peoples
outside of Babylonia founded no lasting empires, and showed no great
aptitude for art or for literary style; but, in point of religion,
they communicated to the world impulses of immeasurable force, which
will act powerfully on the world as long as the Prophet is named or
Christ preached.

It is possible to define to a certain extent the typical religion of
the Semites. The Burnett lectures of the late lamented Professor
Robertson Smith[1] profess to do this; a book in which great learning
and bold speculation are remarkably combined, and which forms one of
the most important contributions to the early history, not of Semitic
religion only, but of early religion in general. The writer was
keenly interested in the study of prehistoric man and of primitive
institutions, and much of his book refers to an earlier period in the
growth of religion than that of the formation of the Semitic type. On
the question of the specific character of Semitic as distinguished
from other religions, it is one of our principal authorities.

[Footnote 1: _Lectures on the Religion of the Semites_. First Series.
The Fundamental Institutions, 1889.]

The Semitic races differ from the Indo-European, with whom alone we
need compare them, in their greater intensity of disposition and a
corresponding poverty of imagination. The Semite has a smaller range
of ideas, but he applies them more practically and more thoroughly.
He has, indeed, an intensely practical turn, and does not touch
philosophy except under an irresistible pressure of great practical
ideas; while for plastic art he has no native inclination. From this
it follows that the religious views he entertains appear to him less
as ideas than as facts, which must be reckoned with to their full
extent as other common facts of life must, and fro