For the achievement of this object a new sphere is demanded--the seclusion and isolation of family life. Accordingly Abraham was called to leave Chaldæa, the scene of Oriental civilization, and led into Canaan, that he might become the father of a great nation, and the source of a new and better civilization. The mountainous region of Palestine was admirably fitted to be the theatre of this new civilization. No other land on the globe was so peculiarly fitted to fulfill this office. The northern half of Syria was not so favorable a locality; for traversed as it was by the great highway from Asia Minor to Assyria, it was subject to the influence of foreign travel from the earliest times. But Palestine lay surrounded by populous countries, and yet isolated from them. In the midst of the six great nations of antiquity--the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Medes, Persians, Phœnicians, and Egyptians--it was separated from them all.[395] Thus secluded and isolated from the rest of mankind, the Hebrews dwelt alone as one great _family_. The first form of government was a patriarchy--the father of the family and of the tribe being the ruler. The second was a theocracy, in which God, the Father of the families of all the earth, becomes the immediate ruler. The third was a monarchy--the government of a man appointed and sustained in his authority by God. And the history of this nation is little else than one of instruction, discipline, and chastisement--a tutelage in which the people were under law and not under grace. The Hebrew civilization represents the _childhood_ of humanity. And the lessons here taught were not lost to the race. They were carried to Assyria and Babylonia during the period of the two captivities; and in the colonies which were founded in Asia Minor, Rome, and Alexandria the influence exerted by Judaism was considerably greater than that which was exerted upon it. The union of Judaism and Platonism is fully represented in Philo the Alexandrian Jew. 3. In Grecian civilization we have the development of personal freedom of thought and action. The Divine discipline of the Jews, as we have seen, was essentially a moral discipline--a discipline of the conscience. This, however, was not a complete discipline of our whole nature. The reason demands culture as well as the conscience. The process and the issue in the two cases were widely different, but they were in some sense complementary; and the one succeeds the other in the order of time. The Divine kingdom of the Jews was just overthrown when free speculation arose in the Ionian colonies of Asia; and the teaching of the last prophet nearly synchronizes with the death of Socrates.[396]