to the structure of the Roman State; this is not quite correct. The latter structure was itself by hypothesis a Church. There was a period when the two were in touch--Constantine the Great acted simultaneously as convener of the Council of Nicæa and as Pontifex Maximus, and his sons, zealous Christians as they were, made him _Divus_ and paid to him the prescribed rites. St. Augustine dared to assert that the true religion had existed before the coming of Christianity in the form of the Classical.[322] V For the understanding of Judaism as a whole between Cyrus and Titus it is necessary constantly to bear in mind three facts, of which scholarship is quite aware, but which, owing to philological and theological _parti pris_, it refuses to admit as factors in its discussions. First, the Jews are a “nation without a land,” a _consensus_, and in the midst, moreover, of a world of pure nations of the same type. Secondly, Jerusalem is indeed a Mecca, a holy centre, but it is neither the home nor the spiritual focus of the people. Lastly, the Jews are a peculiar phenomenon in world-history only so long as we insist on treating them as such. It is true that the post-exilic Jews, in contradistinction to the pre-exilic Israelites are--as Hugo Winckler was the first to recognize--a people of quite new type. But they are not the only representatives of the type. The Aramæan world began in those days to arrange itself in a great number of such peoples, including Persians and Chaldeans,[323] all living in the same district, yet in stringent aloofness from each other, and even then practising the truly Arabian way of life that we call the ghetto.