Keep any oriental religion in the East, however, and there is no saying how long it will last unaltered. Do not travellers talk of the unchanging East? The civilisation of China is almost what it was thousands of years ago. Syrian life to-day is like a picture from the Bible. And the old Orient, as Flaubert said, is the land of religions; and where Asia looks upon Europe, and the communication between them began of yore, you may sample all the faiths of antiquity. Flaubert remarked that the assemblage of all the old religions in Syria was something incredible; it was enough to study for centuries.* * Flaubert, Correspondence, vol. i., p. 344. Asia spawned forth all the great religions, and produced all the great revelations. Arabia is in Africa, but the Arabs are not Africans; they belong to the Semitic race, like the Jews, and the Koran embodies Jewish and other Semitic traditions. The Bible, then, is an oriental book, an Asiatic book, in spite of the Greek elements which are incorporated in the New Testament, notably in the fourth Gospel. It has never been in harmony with the real life of the West. When it has dominated the life of a particular locality, for a certain period, the result has been something typically non-European; as in the case of Scotland under the despotism of the Kirk, whose spiritual slaves prompted Heine's epigram that the Presbyterian Scotchman was a Jew, born in the north, who ate pork. Modern civilisation is mainly a return to the spirit of secular progress which inspired the immortal achievements of Greece and Rome. "The revival of learning and the Renaissance are memorable as the first sturdy breasting by humanity of the hither slope of the great hollow which lies between us and the ancient world. The modern man, reformed and regenerated by knowledge, looks across it, and recognises on the opposite ridge, in the far-shining cities and stately porticoes, in the art, politics, and science of antiquity, many more ties of kinship and sympathy than in the mighty concave between, wherein dwell his Christian ancestry, in the dim light of scholasticism and theology."* * James Cotter Morison, The Service of Man, p. 178.