their exaggerated form from the main current of Judaism, marked the Essenes out as the prototypes of Christian monasticism, and as the most peculiar class of a very peculiar people. Could anything be more diametrically opposed to the genius of Hellas? Despite Pythagorean asceticism and Orphic mysticism, enthusiastic ritual, symbolic purifications and emotional extravagances, Greek life was in the main sober, Greek culture intellectual, and the Greek mind eminently untheological. Those who delight in tracing racial temperament to physical environment may find in the contrast between the two countries an exceptionally favourable illustration of their theory. There is more variety of scenery in a single district of Greece than in the whole of Palestine. Grey rocks and green valleys, roaring torrents and placid lakes, sombre mountains and smiling vineyards, snow-clad peaks and sun-seared plains, glaring light and deep shade alternately come and go with a bewildering rapidity in the one country. In the other, from end to end, the plain spreads its calm, monotonous beauty to the everlasting sun, and the stately palms rear their heads to the blue heavens from year’s end to year’s end, severe, uniform, immutable. It is easy to understand why the one race should have drawn its inspiration from within and the other from without; why the one should have sunk the individual in the community and the other sacrificed the community to the individual; why the one should have worshipped the form and the other the spirit. It is especially easy to understand the Greek’s inextinguishable thirst for new things and the Jew’s rigid attachment to the past. Everything in Greece suggests progress; everything in Palestine spells permanence. The result of this fundamental discrepancy of character was such as might have been foreseen. The intense spirituality of the Jew was scandalised at the genial rationalism and sensuousness of the pagan; while the pagan, in his turn, was repelled by the morose mysticism and austerity of the Jew. History never repeats itself in all particulars. But, so far as repetition is possible, it repeated itself many centuries after, when Puritanism--representing the nearest approach to the sad and stern Hebraic conception of life that the Western mind ever achieved--declared itself the enemy of Romanism, mainly because the latter retained so much of the pagan love for form and delight in things sensuous. Cromwell’s Ironsides illustrated this attitude by marching to battle singing the Psalms of the Hebrew bard. It is given to few mortals, blessed with a calm and truly catholic genius, to reconcile the rival attitudes, and, with Matthew Arnold, to recognise that “it is natural that man should take pleasure in his senses. It is natural, also, that he should take refuge in his heart and imagination from his misery.” CHAPTER II THE JEW IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE