The conquests of Cæsar then, by making the Roman and the German neighbours, neighbours whose presence could not fail to work the deepest impress on each other, opened one side of later history. The world that then was, the world of Roman dominion tempered by Greek influences, had now nations beside it which were neither subjects nor as yet rivals, nations whose mingling with that elder world, in many forms and at many stages, was to call into being the world in which we live. But the Roman and Teutonic elements out of which the world of modern Europe and European colonies was to be formed, were not the Roman and the Teuton in the first state in which history shows them. Their fusion did not come till both had been brought under a common influence. And that was an influence whose birthplace carries us back again from the conquests of Cæsar to the conquests of Pompeius, from the conquests of Pompeius to an earlier stage of the Seleukid power. When that power was weakened on the great day of Magnêsia, its weakness was not merely to open the way for the advance of Parthia from the East. Native powers, held down under Persian and Macedonian supremacy, sprang into new life. The greatest of existing Semitic powers had been humbled; it was soon to be wiped out; but the abiding life of the Semitic race showed itself in new shapes, in one shape that was doomed to be more abiding than the power of Sidon and Carthage. That shape of Semitic influence was to intertwine itself so closely with the power of Rome that the two could never more be rent asunder. Arab lords of Damascus gave a foretaste of the days when mightier Arab lords of Damascus should reign from the Indus to the Ocean. Hebrew lords of Jerusalem called up the memory of the days when mightier Hebrew lords of Jerusalem had reigned from the river to the Great Sea westward. Hannibal might die in banishment; his city might become heaps like older Nineveh; but men speaking the tongue of Hannibal, though they worshipped not the gods of Hannibal, were, from the day when the holy zeal of Mattathias struck down the renegade, to form one of the great moving powers in all future history. If the Greek was to enlighten the world, if the Roman was to rule the world, if the Teuton was to be the common disciple and missionary of both, it was from the Hebrew that all were to learn the things that belong to another world. In the highest teaching of all, Roman and Goth had to become the disciples of the Jew, but of the Jew speaking only by the mouth of a Greek interpreter. Before the Aryan world of Europe could truly do its work, it had to take to itself a Semitic creed. It had to take to itself that Semitic creed so fully, so exclusively, as to make it by adoption the creed of Europe, to make it before all things the creed of Rome. For the last twelve hundred years the Eternal Question has taken the shape of an abiding strife between two creeds alike of Semitic birth. But of