It was only a comparatively small part of the Jewish nation whose home was the city of Jerusalem in the later postexilic period. The Israelite community was now widely scattered in the cities of the East and the West. One important outcome of this, in its bearings upon the moral life of Israel and of the nations that were to receive ethical instruction from her, was the establishment of the synagogue.[414] For the Deuteronomic code had made religion to be something connected with the Temple, something separate and apart from true morality, whose root is in human relationships. Now the Dispersion, tearing the Israelites away from the Temple, tended to bring into prominence those religious exercises and those duties which had nothing to do with the Temple service. This was favorable to the religion and morality of the prophets, as opposed to the religion and morality of the priests. The services of the synagogue took the place of the ceremonies and sacrifices of the Temple.[415] These services consisted in the reading and translation of a portion of the Scriptures with comments thereupon.[416] This meant the incoming of a new and powerful agency in the promotion not only of the religious but also of the moral education of humanity, for this custom “was the origin of the homily and sermon.”[417] The synagogue was the prototype and precursor of the Christian basilica and the Puritan meetinghouse. [Sidenote: The new doctrine of immortality: its ethical import] The reëstablishment of the Law we have pronounced the chief ethical fact in the history of Judaism after the return from the Babylonian Captivity. And this is true if it is the history of the Jews alone that we have in mind; but regarding the moral evolution in the world at large there is another fact belonging to this period of even greater importance. This was the incoming of the doctrine of immortality.[418] We have seen that from the first the Hebrews, like the Babylonians, held a belief in a sort of shadowy existence after death;[419] but of a belief in personal immortality in our sense of the word, of a life of rewards and punishments beyond the grave, there is no certain trace in Hebrew literature until about the third or second century B.C.[420]