Wherever we turn in our language, we have only to scratch the surface in order to come upon fresh traces of Rome and of her solid, concrete achievements in the world. With Greece, however, it is different. It was not the outer fabric of a future European civilization which the Greeks were building up while their own civilization flourished, but the shadowy, inner world of human consciousness. They were creating our outlook. We shall see a little later how the language which is used by the theologians, philosophers, and scientists of Europe was the gradual and painful creation of the thinkers of ancient Greece; and we shall see that, without that language, the thoughts and feelings and impulses which it expresses could have no being. Rome’s task was to erect across Europe a rigid and durable framework on which the complicated texture of thought, feeling, and will, woven in the looms of Athens and Alexandria, could be permanently outspread. Yet the performance of this task, concrete as it was, was inseparably connected with an event of tremendous import for that growing, inner world to which we have already referred—the most significant event, as many believe, in the whole history of mankind. The first casual contact between Greek coaster and Semitic trader, imaginatively portrayed in the stanza quoted above from Matthew Arnold, was indeed prophetic. It proved afterwards to have been not merely a memorable event, but a sort of fertilization of the whole history of humanity. For to one Semitic tribe the passionate inner world of its thoughts and feelings had remained almost more real than the outward one of matter and energy. The language of the Old Testament is alone enough to tell us that, while the Greek Aryans had been pouring their vigour into the creation of intellectual wisdom and liberty, the Hebrews had been building up within themselves an extraordinary moral and emotional life, as narrow as it was intense. The two streams of evolution, stronger for having been kept apart, were destined to meet and intermingle. In 332 B.C., when Alexander the Great sacked Sidon and Tyre, Aryans and Semites began for the first time to live side by side. They did not intermarry, but subtle influences must have passed from one to the other, for in Alexandria, shortly afterwards, contact between the two grew so intimate that by the second century B.C. Greek had become the official language of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the same century a Roman Protectorate was established over Syria, which in due course of time became a province of the Roman Empire. In that province was born the individual who is known to history as Jesus of Nazareth.