It is one answer to this question to say that this wonderfully placed people had, alone among the nations, a genuine faith, a genuine hope, and a genuine charity. They at least, says Seneca, when he complains of their influence, 'knew the reasons of their customs.' There was a _raison d'être_ to their religion. In a world which still kept up the forms of worship and respect for gods whose character and existence could not stand the criticism of its own best moral and religious insight, any more than that of its scepticism; or which was framing for itself thoughts of Deity by intellectual abstraction; or which was betraying its real ignorance of the very idea of God by worshipping the two great powers which, as a matter of fact, it knew to be mighty, Nature and the Roman Empire,--the Jew had a _faith_, distinct, colossal, and unfailing, in a Living God, Maker of heaven and earth. This we may be sure was the inner secret of the true attraction which drew the hearts of such men as Cornelius the centurion to the despised and repulsive Jew. This God, they further believed, was their God for ever and ever. 'Let us kneel,' they said, 'before the Lord our Maker, for He is the Lord our God.' And therefore, let them have gained it how they may, they had an indomitable _hope_, or rather, confidence, which all unpropitiousness of outer appearances had only served to stimulate, that He would bring them through, that He had a purpose for them, and that He would bring it to pass: that the world was no mechanical system of meaningless vicissitudes, but an order, of which indeed they little realized the scope, moving under the hand of a Ruler for a purpose of glory and beneficence. That the confidence of the extraordinary destiny which, under this order, was reserved for Israel, as well as the present possession of the Divine law and covenant, should have produced an intense sense of unity and fellowship was a matter of course. The Roman is obliged to recognise their mutual _charity_, however deformed, as he thinks, by their antipathy to all who were not of their kindred and faith. But such an answer to our question, though it brings before us a sign, and a sign of the very highest, that is of the moral and spiritual, order, does not perhaps set us at the point from which the whole meaning of the position opens to us most naturally. It may do this more effectually to ask whether there was any material in Judaism for a world-religion, and for that world-religion which grew out of it?