Let us begin with our religion. No one can understand even the historical possibility of the Christian religion without knowing something of the Jewish race, which must be studied chiefly in the pages of the Old Testament. And in order to appreciate the true relation of the Jews to the rest of the ancient world, and to understand what ideas were peculiarly their own, and what ideas they shared in common with the other members of the Semitic stock, or what moral and religious impulses they received from their historical contact with other nations of antiquity, it is absolutely necessary that we should pay some attention to the history of Babylon, Nineveh, Phoenicia, and Persia. These may seem distant countries and forgotten people, and many might feel inclined to say, "Let the dead bury their dead; what are those mummies to us?" Still, such is the marvellous continuity of history, that I could easily show you many things which we, even we who are here assembled, owe to Babylon, to Nineveh, to Egypt, Phoenicia, and Persia. Every one who carries a watch owes to the Babylonians the division of the hour into sixty minutes. It may be a very bad division, yet such as it is, it has come to us from the Greeks and Romans, and it came to them from Babylon. The sexagesimal division is peculiarly Babylonian. Hipparchos, 150 B.C., adopted it from Babylon, Ptolemy, 150 A.D., gave it wider currency, and the French, when they decimated everything else, respected the dial-plates of our watches, and left them with their sixty Babylonian minutes. Every one who writes a letter owes his alphabet to the Romans and Greeks; the Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians learned it in Egypt. It may be a very imperfect alphabet--as all the students of phonetics will tell you--yet, such as it is and has been, we owe it to the old Phoenicians and Egyptians, and in every letter we trace, there lies imbedded the mummy of an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic. What do we owe to the Persians? It does not seem to be much, for they were not a very inventive race, and what they knew they had chiefly learned from their neighbors, the Babylonians and Assyrians. Still, we owe them something. First of all, we owe them a large debt of gratitude for having allowed themselves to be beaten by the Greeks; for think what the world would have been if the Persians had beaten the Greeks at Marathon, and had enslaved--that means, annihilated--the genius of ancient Greece. However, this may be called rather an involuntary contribution to the progress of humanity, and I mention it only in order to show how narrowly, not only Greeks and Romans, but Saxons and Anglo-Saxons too, escaped becoming Parsis or Fire-worshippers.