The lawgiver passed to his rest. His laws and literature, surviving through many vicissitudes, have produced in each succeeding age a new harvest of poetry and history, leavened with their own spirit. In the mean time the learning and the superstition of Egypt faded from the eyes of men. The splendid political and military organizations of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Macedon arose and crumbled into dust. The wonderful literature of Greece blazed forth and expired. That of Rome, a reflex and copy of the former, had reached its culminating point; and no prophet had arisen among any of these Gentile nations to teach them the truth of God. The world, with all its national liberties crushed out, its religion and its philosophy corrupted and enfeebled to the last degree by an endless succession of borrowings and intermixtures, lay prostrate under the iron heel of Rome. Then appeared among the now obscure remnant of Israel, one who announced himself as the Prophet like unto Moses, promised of old; but a prophet whose mission it was to redeem not Israel only, but the whole world, and to make all who will believe, children of faithful Abraham. Adopting the whole of the sacred literature of the Hebrews, and proving his mission by its words, he sent forth a few plain men to write its closing books, and to plant it on the ruins of all the time-honored beliefs of the nations--beliefs supported by a splendid and highly organized priestly system and by despotic power, and gilded by all the highest efforts of poetry and art.