Alexander, when he went conquering, with little or no opposition, into Egypt, had shown much favour to the Jews. We have seen that many of them had returned, under favour of Cyrus the Persian, from their Babylonian exile, to Jerusalem. The temple had been {161} rebuilt, not without a good deal of interference from their Syrian neighbours; the religious rites had been re-instituted and were strictly observed. Alexander, it appears, showed consideration to the Jews in Jerusalem. He was, we may presume, a Greek in his religious views--that is to say, that religion made very little difference and had very little part in his life. He would not care what god a subject people liked to worship, so long as they did not oppose him. He took some of the Jews down with him, or had them brought, into Egypt, where there were already some of their nation, and they were given quarters of their own and a synagogue, or place of assembly and worship, in the new city of Alexandria. So here we have yet another step in that dispersion of the Jews which was to bring their religion, on which Christianity is founded, into all parts of the world. I mentioned too that, rather as the Jewish religion became known throughout the world by the dispersion of those who followed it, so also did the thought and culture of the Greeks become known by the way in which that wonderful people was spread abroad. I have been writing of Macedonians hitherto as though they were a people altogether different from the Greeks, and so in truth, and in origin, they were. But I want you to realise that though they conquered Greece by their force of arms, it was (as always happened whenever Greeks met people of other nationality) the Greek thought that conquered their thought. They began more and more to think in the Greek way. Moreover, their very armies were largely Greek. Thus it came to pass, in course of time, that the distinction between Macedonian and Greek began to be lost. After all, Macedon was a very near neighbour {162} of Greece herself. There must have been much coming and going between the two. Therefore the "Hellenising" of the world, as you may read it described--which means making the thought of the world like the thought of Hellas, which is another name for Greece--went on very fast and was spread abroad very widely. There is no part of that world which is the scene of our great story which it had not reached and in which it had not made a considerable difference in the lives of the inhabitants. Over a large part of it Greek had become the language in use among the better-educated classes. Seleucus was particularly active in introducing Greeks and Greek customs into the kingdom under his rule.