82. “There is one history, and that the most touching and most profound of all, for which we should search in vain through all the pages of the classics,――I mean the history of the human soul in its relations with its Maker; the history of its sin, and grief, and death, and of the way of its recovery to hope and life and to enduring joy. For the exercises of strength and skill, for the achievements and for the enchantments of wit, of eloquence, of art, of genius, for the imperial games of politics and of war let us seek them on the shores of Greece.... All the wonders of the Greek civilisation heaped together are less wonderful, than the single Book of Psalms.” 83. “Palestine was weak and despised, always obscure, oftentimes and long trodden down beneath the feet of imperious masters. On the other hand, Greece, for a thousand years, ... repelled every invader from her shores. Fostering her strength in the keen air of freedom, she defied, and at length overthrew, the mightiest of empires; and when finally she felt the resistless grasp of the masters of all the world, then too, at the very moment of her subjugation, she herself subdued them to her literature, language, arts, and manners. Palestine, in a word, had no share in the glories of our race; while they blaze on every page of the history of Greece with an overpowering splendour. Greece had valour, policy, renown, genius, wisdom, wit; she had all, in a word, that this world could give her; but the flowers of Paradise, which blossom at the best but thinly, blossomed in Palestine alone.”¹ ¹ Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order, 1865, in Gleanings of Past Years 1860‒79. By the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., vol. vii. ... London: ... 1879. _pp._ 79‒80. Here we have again the closest connection between Zionism and Biblical ideas. At the Great Assembly Hall, Mile End, on the 29th May, 1891, on the occasion when the petition to be presented to the _Sultan_ of Turkey, composed in _Hebrew_ and English, was communicated to the public by Mr. S. Montagu, M.P. (afterwards Lord Swaythling), Mr. Elim H. _d’_Avigdor declared:―― “... His objection to colonising America was that the farther west they went, the greater the distance they placed between them and _Zion_. He wished rather that they should go to a country that was once _Israel’s_ homestead, where brother might work with brother, where the _Sabbath_ would be the _Sabbath_ of all, and where _Yom Kippur_ would be the day of abstention from food throughout the country. He was convinced that many wealthy co-religionists were willing to surrender cheerfully all their worldly possessions, and resign all their hopes of worldly aggrandisement, in order to return with their brethren to the land of their fathers. They express the hope every _Passover_, ‘Next year in _Jerusalem_.’ Was this utterance merely a lip service, or did it spring from their hearts?...” Lieut.-Col. Goldsmid followed, and said:――