Intellect came to absolute consciousness for the first time amongst the Jews, and in this their historical importance and weight lie. Man, created in the image of God, lost his state of innocence, absolute contentment and immortality, by eating of the tree of knowledge. The Jews were the first to recognise in a higher sense the double nature of man--his godhead and his animal nature. The country in which they developed is a perfect geological marvel. The region in which they settled was divided by a river and a sea. This sea is 1,400 feet below the level of the Mediterranean. The river flows downwards, like the Stygian river, far beneath the level of the ocean. The banks of the Jordan and the lake Asphaltites are the lowest regions of the habitable globe. In the west the Jews found some fertile plains, but they never could obtain full and peaceful possession of them, nor of the sea-coast. They were shut out from the world in a mountainous region as in a gloomy Puritan chapel, and had ample leisure for self-contemplation, and for attempting to solve the riddle of man’s destiny with the help of Egyptian wisdom, Persian, Assyrian and Babylonian theories. Rocks and sand formed the foreground of their earthly existence; the background was made up by a gloomy river and a still gloomier sea--the sea of death, the Acherusian, the Plutonian lake. A sea too low, too mephitic and poisonous for art to exist round it. A region of sorrow, sinfulness, and abject wretchedness cannot be the abode of art and science. The fine art of the Jews was like a migratory bird in its passage over the sea of death. Not only with the Jews, but also with the Egyptians, Persians, and early Greeks, to represent a god in the likeness of man was considered sinful. The Persians abhorred idols in any shape. The Egyptians gave their gods shape and form, but a merely symbolic form, expressing in concrete signs some higher abstract conception. The human head, the body of a beast or fish, the horns of a ram, or the ears of a cow; the human leg with the foot of a goat, or the human arm with the claws of a bird of prey, were sacred, because symbolical. They had a metaphysical theology written in hieroglyphs. All this was prohibited with the Jews. They allowed some exceptions, and borrowed the figures of the cherubim from the Assyrians, the oxen of the temple from the Egyptians, and the sculptured lions of Solomon’s palace from the Persians; their artists were foreigners, and the imitation of these works was ever after forbidden.