With the destruction of the temple there arose the synagogue, which, with its reading of the Law and the Prophets, its chanting of the Psalms, its offering of prayer, and the giving heed to the voices of the elders, represented a far higher and more spiritual service than temple courts reeking with sacrifices and steaming with incense. It is true that they were still fascinated by the material splendours of the former days; for after their return they restored Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, and re-appointed its services. A revival led to a reformation, which, following the old lines as closely as possible, assumed the form of a retrogression rather than advance. The new energies of the nation were repressed by a Levitical domination as rigid and intolerant as Brahmanism ever was in India. It was not the spirit of the Living God but the hand of the long dead Moses that was to rule their conscience and mould their history. The consequence was just what might have been anticipated. Human nature revolted from subjugation to a system which had served its day. Religion, where it was earnest, stiffened into formalism, and formalism in many cases congealed into hypocrisy, and, as inevitably happens, intellect raised its protest against this irreligious religion in many anti-religious and even atheistic forms. Meanwhile synagogues rose all over the land, promoting doctrine rather than ritual, stimulating rather than repressing discussion, and thus conserving and propagating the truths that prepared the ways of the Lord. Only a handful however, had returned; the majority of the exiles prospered and multiplied, and, unlike the ten tribes, were not absorbed among the Gentiles. At the beginning of the Christian era, for one Jew living in Palestine there would be a hundred living beyond it, not only in Babylonia, but in Greece, and Egypt, and Italy, and all over the Empire. There were many Jews in Spain, in Britain, and in the dark territories beyond the Danube; and though they adapted themselves to foreign ways, and became all things to all men, in regard to their religion and their intimate connection with Jerusalem they still continued to be Jews.[113] As their nationality declined their faith arose. By and by, not content with the heathen toleration for their religion as only one of the many in the world, they began to spread it abroad. Judaism, with the temple and the Levitical law, would in Palestine eventually have petrified, but the Diaspora, with the Synagogue and the Septuagint, enabled Israel to play their proper parts as the religious teachers of mankind. Proselytism gradually became very vigorous and successful; devout men and women everywhere, unable to find peace of conscience in the intoxicating and demoralising rites of Pagan temples, turned from them to take hold of the skirts of the man who was a Jew. In a manner and to an extent which even the youthful Isaiah never could have dreamed, Jerusalem began to attract out of every nation under