The history of Israel presents some of the most striking phenomena in world history. No other nation (with the exception of the two very ancient nations of the Far East) has annals so long as are those of the descendants of Abraham. Those annals go back, dim as are their earlier outlines, to a time long anterior to the earliest records of the Hellenic and Italic peoples. The records of the old civilization of Assyria and Egypt are, no doubt, even more remote in time, but the nations that created those civilizations have been so changed by conquest and the admixture of new elements that we can no longer recognise them as the same. But Israel has preserved its identity through all vicissitudes. It was carried into captivity in a far land, and returned thence after seventy years. It was, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Emperor Hadrian, scattered over the face of the earth, and now counts its children everywhere, from Singapore to San Francisco. Its numbers have grown to be fifteen or twenty times greater than they were before the Great Dispersion. It has been kept in existence as a nation through many centuries of oppression and suffering by its Faith and its Literature, a faith embodied in a law which included both a moral and a ceremonial code, a Literature small in bulk but splendid in content, which has formed the mind of the people, sharpening their intelligence and intensifying their national self-consciousness. It is one of those three great literatures of the ancient world which still rule the thought and still help to form the character of mankind. This is a unique phenomenon, and perhaps the most striking testimony that history can show to the vivifying power of ideas.