Too great of breadth to be individually selfish, she was not great enough to be nationally unselfish. The individual sides of themselves her people sacrificed on the altars of the state to her national unity, she transmuted into contempt and hatred of other nations. Selfishness only passed from the individual to the state. Retained by the state, it worked itself back into the individuals again, when the unity of the state was disintegrated. Do we not have in the limitations which Greece attempted to put on the expression which the social nature of man would give of itself, the real secret of their downfall? If, while giving even limited social expression to her national life, Greece developed a civilization so rich, how much greater might have been her contribution to human progress had not the seeds of disintegration been sown among her people through national enmity and hate. In the two hundred years which embraced the most fertile portion of her history she laid the foundation of thought. But it was only through thought that she sought to solve the problems of life and destiny. The social life of the Jews found only limited expression for itself. It was worked out into religious lines that were unlimited and all embracing, but this was in spite of their prejudices. Their compact social life, the vast depth and vigor of their social vitality, the tenacity with which they clung together, made it possible for them to lay the foundation of a religion and an ethics larger than they dreamed. Their scriptures, their prophets, and their saints were not possible in a soil less socially rich. Their devotion, their loyalty, their voluntary subordination of private to public interests, their religious fidelity fitted them to become the children of God. The summit of civilization they reached enabled them to see and to transcribe the outlines of the kingdom of heaven. They ascended high enough the mount of being to recognize the laws necessary to regulate human conduct. But they permitted their narrowness and prejudice to build of the Gentiles about them, walls to limit the outflow of their national life. Hate for the unfortunate people without, could not be without its influence on the lives of those within. The selfishness which, as a nation, they cherished toward other people, reproduced itself at length in their own lives. From the children of God they descended until they became the children of the devil. The visions of their nobler men were discounted and despised. The selfishness that put them against the Gentiles, finally put them against one another; and while they kept together in a certain sense, in spite of the upper and nether mill stones of history, it was rather in memory of what they had been, than of what they were.