"One night Charmides was walking through the lowest part of the city, and he heard from a mere hovel the sound of a hymn. He knew what it was--that it was the secret celebration of a religious rite by the despised sect of the Jews and their wretched proselytes. The Jews were especially hateful to him and to all cultured people in Rome. They were typical of all the qualities which culture abhorred. No Jew had ever produced anything lovely in any department whatever--no picture, statue, melody, nor poem. Their literature was also barbaric: there was no consecutiveness in it, no reasoning, no recognition in fact of the reason. It was a mere mass of legends without the exquisite charm and spiritual intention of those of Greece, of bloody stories and obscure disconnected prophecies by shepherds and peasants. Their god was a horror, a boor upon a mountain, wielding thunder and lightning. Aphrodite was perhaps not all that could be wished, but she was divine compared with the savage Jehovah. It was true that a recent Jewish sect professed better things and recognised as their teacher a young malefactor who was executed when Tiberius was emperor. So far, however, as could be made out he was a poor crack-brained demagogue, who dreamed of restoring a native kingdom in Palestine. What made the Jews especially contemptible to culture was that they were retrograde. They strove to put back the clock. There is only one path, so culture affirmed, and that is the path opened by Aristotle, the path of rational logical progress from what we already know to something not now known, but which can be known. If our present state is imperfect, it is because we do not know enough. Every other road, excepting this, the king's highway, heads into a bog. These Jews actually believed in miracles; they had no science, and thought they could regenerate the world by hocus-pocus. They ought to be suppressed by law, and, if necessary, put to death, for they bred discontent.