Almost always the nations created to play a part in universal civilization, like Judæa, Greece, and the Italy of the renaissance, exercise their full action upon the world, only after becoming victims to their own grandeur. They must first die; then the world lives on them, assimilates to itself that which they have created at the price of their fever and their sufferings. Nations ought to choose in fact between the long, tranquil, obscure destiny of that which lives for itself, and the troubled, stormy career of that which lives for humanity. The nation which works out social and religious problems in its own bosom is almost always weak politically. Every country which dreams of a kingdom of God, which lives for general ideas, which pursues a work of universal interest, sacrifices through the same its individual destiny, enfeebles and destroys its _rôle_ as a terrestrial country. One can never set himself on fire with impunity. Since Judæa made the religious conquest of the world, it was necessary that she should disappear as a nation. A revolution of extreme violence broke out in this country in the year 66. During four years, this strange race, which seemed created to defy equally that which blessed and that which cursed it, was in a convulsion before which the historian should pause with respect as he would before all mystery. The causes of this crisis were very old, and the crisis itself was inevitable. The Mosaic law, a work of exalted Utopians possessed of a powerful socialist ideal,--the least politic of men,--was, like the Islam, exclusive of a civil society parallel with a religious society. This law, which appears to have been drawn up, as we now read it, in the seventh century before Jesus Christ, would have been the means of destroying the little kingdom of the descendants of David, even without the Assyrian conquest. Since the preponderance assumed by the prophetic element, the kingdom of Judah--embroiled with all its neighbors, seized with a permanent rage against Tyre, hating Edom, Moab, and Ammon--could no longer survive. I repeat, a nation which devotes itself to social and religious problems neglects its politics. The day in which Israel became "a peculiar people of God, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation," it was written that she should no longer be a nation as other nations. Contrary destinies cannot be united: an exaltation is always expiated by an abasement.