the notion) but--kept within tolerable bounds. For the rest, what more could a man desire than to live as had his father before him? Ancestral custom held the whole of life in its paralysing grasp, and choked initiative. The potter sought no new patterns; what was wrong with the old? Why devise a new method of ploughing, when the old way grew the crops? Innovation was an altogether hateful thing. Hence, however populous Eastern towns might grow, however active and prosperous their commerce, life in them was essentially stationary, its ambitions limited, its possibilities achieved. In all Palestine there was but one spark of unexhausted thought; namely, the conception of God which the great prophets of Israel had discovered and transmitted to their people. Evidently a nation which remembered such words as these: _I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me your burnt offerings and meal offerings I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream_[40]--that nation is not finished; it has living seed within its soil. Yes, but against this confident assertion recall how shrunken and enfeebled the Jewish community had become. Further, remember that in all things except their religion and their morality these Jews were part and parcel of the general Oriental civilisation. In their civil occupations, their commercial and agricultural methods, they also were just as much slaves of tradition and as content with their bondage, as were their neighbours. “Slaves of tradition,” how much the words cover! If even dimly we could realise the misery, disease and squalor of the poor, the degradation of womanhood, in those tradition-ridden Eastern towns; if we could taste like gall and bitterness in our own experience one thousandth part of the injustice and cruelties of those “contented” despotisms; “A stationary civilisation, having reached the limit of its ambitions”--how easily the phrase is framed!--if we could feel how much that meagre consummation left to be desired, the words would seem to be written in blood and blotted with tears!