One region of the empire alone was free from the symptoms of religious decay. In the small district of Palestine, with many offshoots scattered over the world, lived a people who professed a religion of the purest type. And this religion was not a lightly held philosophical theory; its adherents clung to it with a passionate tenacity, and were ever ready to face martyrdom in its defence. It was a pure monotheism, and morality was inculcated by it, indeed, maintained by it, in the strongest and most effective fashion. With justice Josephus could assert that Greek philosophers only followed the example of his countrymen, and taught doctrines which the Jewish sacred law had made practical realities.[1] For Judaism was not an esoteric creed which only the more cultured Jews fully understood; the lowest of the people grasped its principles, abhorred the idea of polytheism, detested even the smallest advance towards idolatry, and regarded every sin as a violation of divine decrees. Such a religion, pure and strongly held, was fit to be the parent of a noble religious system. In it originated the earliest doctrines of the religion which now sprang from it and conquered the Roman world. And as Judaism was in a special sense a national religion, its development must be examined in the history of the Jewish people. We cannot, with any approach to historical certainty, assert more respecting the social and political condition of the first known ancestors of the Jews, than that they belonged to a race of nomad tribes wandering in the district which, roughly speaking, lies between Egypt and Palestine. In endeavouring to ascertain the religious ideas of this race, we may safely assume that the character of their religion was determined by the circumstances of their position. Living in a region which is either desert or barren and unprofitable land, the softer influences of nature could not affect them. The terror of nature would fascinate them; lightning and tempest would speak to them of their gods, and from the harshness of their surroundings they would derive the gloomiest impressions of the powers of the supernatural world. Their religion would be essentially a religion of fear.[2] Having little to deify on the earth around them, their mythology would be based on the phenomena of the sky. Sun and moon and stars would be their divinities, and to these they would ascribe jealous and implacable tempers. This sternness of their religion would carry with it many advantages. Their deities would be more majestic, more removed from themselves, than the gods of happier peoples, and the humility they would feel in worship would have within it the seeds of a higher religious development. A still more important feature of their mythology would be its narrowness. The poverty of their environment would cause their gods to be few and limited in number. No fresh divinities would discredit the older ones and reveal the weakness of their theology.