In this religious brotherhood of nations there was one disturbing unit: one race alone stubbornly and offensively declined to join the concert. The Jews held that their own religion was wholly true; the religions of others were wholly false. They arrogantly boasted that they alone were God’s people. They believed themselves to be in league with the Creator of the Universe, sharing His secrets and monopolising His favours; for had not the Lord entered into a solemn and everlasting covenant with Abraham? It was they whom the Lord had selected to be a holy and special people unto Himself, above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servants whom I have chosen.” It was for them that the laws of Nature had been suspended; that the sea was made dry land; that the heavens rained manna, and the rocks gave forth water; that mounts had quaked; that the sun and moon had stood still, and the walls of cities fallen down flat at the sound of the trumpet. It was for them that prophets and inspired men had revealed the oracles and the will of God. If the Pagan was ready to forgive Jewish eccentricity, no man could tolerate Jewish intolerance; and the resentment which the Jew’s aloofness aroused in the breast even of the educated Gentile is palpable in the pages of many ancient authors. Only three Greek writers make a favourable mention of the Jews, the most eminent among them being Strabo the geographer. He, curiously enough, speaks with admiration of the spiritual worship of Jehovah as contrasted with the monstrous idolatry of Egypt and the anthropomorphic idolatry of Greece. Less curious, but no less rare, is the writer’s appreciation of the moral excellence of the Mosaic Law and his reverence for the Temple of Jerusalem. Strabo’s liberal attitude, however, was not shared by the Romans. They are emphatic and unanimous in their condemnation of Judaism--Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Pliny, and, above all, Tacitus. The great historian seems to give utterance to a common sentiment in denouncing the rites of the Jews as “novel and contrary to the ideas of other mortals.” He accuses the followers of Moses “of holding profane all things that to us are sacred; and, on the other hand, of indulging in things which to us are forbidden.”[24] The Hebrew horror of the worship of images and of the deification of ancestors and Emperors, as exemplified by the fierce storm which Caligula’s mad order to have his own statue set up in the Temple raised, gave great offence to the Romans; while the Jewish marriage laws, which permitted a brother to wed his deceased brother’s wife and an uncle his own niece, could not but be considered by the Romans as a sanction of incest. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the severe moralist should brand Mosaic institutions as “evil and disgusting, owing their prevalence to their very depravity.” Likewise, the national movement which, as