Nevertheless, the reality of Old Testament history, while suffering from lack of proportion in relation to other parts of human history, has been impressed upon modern civilization through its close identification with the religious life. The inheritance of these scriptures of the ancient Hebrew has been so complete that the modern Jew is regarded almost as a pretender when he sets up a claim to special possession. We jostle him out of the way, and appropriate his national documents as the old title-deeds of Christianity. There is, indeed, an historic truth involved in this; but, however we may regard it, we are brought back to the significant fact that along with the Greek and the Roman influence upon modern life has been the mighty force of Hebraism. The Greek has impressed himself upon our modes and processes of thought, the Roman upon our organization, the Hebrew upon our religious and social life.[20] It is certain that the Bible has been a storehouse from which have been drawn illustrations of life and character, and that these have had an authority beyond anything in classic history and literature. It has been the book from which youth with us has drawn its conceptions of life outside of the limited circle of human experience; and the geographical, historical, and archæological apparatus employed to illustrate it has been far more considerable than any like apparatus in classical study. The Bible has been the university to the person of ordinary culture; it has brought into his life a foreign element which Greece and Rome have been powerless to present; and though the images of this remote foreign life often have been distorted, and strangely mingled with familiar notions, there can be no doubt that the mind has been enlarged by this extension of its interests and knowledge.