have their periods of world ascendancy; and the transition from Semitic to Aryan begins to be made when Cyrus the Medo-Persian conquers the huge empire of Chaldea and finds there the Hebrews, a captive people who since the far-away time of Abraham have lived through a momentous cycle of divine education from Chaldea to Chaldea again, and are now ready to take up their appointed mission in the new order of civilization. From this epoch onward, and especially as Biblical literature matures, we can realize with increasing clearness the part which the Semitic influence was destined to play in the civilizing forces of the world.

NOTE. Racial Influences. Our intellectual and moral gains from the past are, broadly speaking, the resultant of two great deposits of thought and sentiment, the one the gift of the Aryan, the other a boon from the Semitic race. To the former we owe, again speaking generally, most of our mental and political acquisitions; to the latter, the principal elements of our moral and spiritual heritage. . . . The business of civilizing and saving the world, as far as the merely human factors are concerned, has been carried on through the transfer of moral and spiritual ideas and the arts of civilized life from the one race to the other. In nearly everything vital to human well-being the Semites were the founders or forerunners. . . . The greatest boon . which any race or people ever conferred upon humanity, was that of religious truth and freedom, and this was the gift of the Hebrews of Palestine. Yet not by them as a race has it been or is it now being converted to the uses of the world. While the unique national career and institutions of Israel fitted that single people to be the depositaries of saving truth and knowledge, it was the civilizing genius of one branch of the Aryan race and the political supremacy of another, which prepared the wider and deeper channels through which the divinely conferred endowment was conveyed to the kindreds and people of mankind. MCCURDY," History, Prophecy, and the Monuments," Vol. I, pp. 5-7.

2. For its bearing on religion, we return from the undifferentiated Semitic stock, of whose intense genius seers, martyrs, and fanatics are bred"1 and three of the leading

1 G. A. Smith, "Historical Geography of the Holy Land," p. 29.

religions of the world (namely, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity) have come, to the Hebrew branch, to take note of its more specific function. Here again we see how vitally their energy of faith and will coördinates with the distinctive gifts of other races. They were not eminent in art and literature and philosophic thought; this was the gift of the Greeks to the education of humanity. For the organization and administration of empire and law and government we cannot look to them; this was the gift of the Romans. But to this Hebrew race we owe preeminently the development of religious insight and conscience to the point where it is ready to transcend ethnic or racial bounds and become a universal boon for humanity. Thus they formed, so to say, one strand in a threefold cord of comprehensive development and culture, supplying the distinctively spiritual element. By reason of their unique experience and leading, religious ideas were so developed, purified, and proportioned to life, that only the culminating stage of the Christian interpretation was needed to free them from provincial limits and make them universal. No other race approaches them in this endowment. It is to the Hebrew mind the world owes it that religion is held as a vital element of practical and rational living, that is, as a righteous character vitalized by conscience, -as distinguished from a crude magic and superstition, on the one side, and a dead mechanical formalism, on the other. And the vehicle by which this is conveyed to the world is the body of literature which the enlightened world has adopted as its Bible.

NOTE. The Hebrew Religious Sense. As long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else. - ARNOLD, "Literature and Dogma," p. 50.

II

The Dominant Aptitude. Every nation has its distinctive type of mind, its characteristic approach to things. In its contemplation of the world of nature and man and life, that attitude to the universe out of which comes its distinctive strain of literary utterance, the Hebrew mind may best be understood, perhaps, by comparison with the Greek, the one other great originative mind of history.

While the Greek mind was keenly intellectual, apt in abstract thinking and reasoning, the Hebrew mind was intense, concrete, realistic. To the Greek, truth presented itself in principles, laws, logical deductions; to the Hebrew in analogies, intuitions, descriptive imagery. We may in part name these dominant aptitudes by saying the Greek was a born philosopher, the Hebrew an alert observer. From the Greek cast of mind comes abstract and systematic thinking; from the Hebrew cast of mind, keen observation and intuitive insight. St. Paul has touched upon this distinction in his remark that the Jews look for a sign, while the Greeks seek after wisdom; by which he means that while the Greeks project their own intellectual powers onward to solve the problem of being in human terms, the Hebrews begin with belief in the divine, the personal Source of all life, and interpret facts and events as tokens of His working. Hence their tendency to invest everything they see and experience with spiritual values, to explore life in terms of personal worth and conduct.

The bearing of this aptitude of mind on their distinctive gift in literature may be expressed in a quotation from Bearing on Professor S. H. Butcher. "While philosophy,' Literature he says, "had for the Jews no meaning, history had a deeper significance than it bore to any other people. It was the chief factor in their national unity, the source from which they drew ethical and spiritual enlightenment.

Thither they turned as to living oracles inscribed with the finger of the Almighty. To history they appealed as the supreme tribunal of God's justice.'

"1

Accordingly we see that the whole body of the Hebrew literature, as we have it in the Bible, is closely interwoven with history history read as luminous with the presence of God, and therefore sensed in its inner meanings, rather than in dead annals and chronicles. Their laws, when compiled and codified, are set in a framework of history. Their poetry and didactics are associated with historic names and personages. Their prophecy rises and flourishes as the larger outlooks of history call for it, interpreting by vital principles the history that is current and the historical crises that are impending. It is in the concrete events that pass before their eyes, or are remembered from their past, that they trace the direct working of Jehovah and the signs of His will and purpose for the future.

Inhering with this Hebrew sense for the inner meanings of history, a phase of it indeed, is the fact that the whole trend of their literature is prophetic. They showed their sense of this in making up their canon by calling the whole line of historians from Joshua to 2 Kings "the former prophets." They were schooled to the consciousness that they were a divinely chosen people, a people with a high destiny, toward which the events of their history were being shaped according to the purpose of Jehovah. Hence prophecy, as a constant and organic element of history, has greater power, range, depth, and significance for the Hebrews than for any other people. The Hebrew mind is peculiarly susceptible to it, and thinks in its large terms. Accordingly, one of the most remarkable phenomena of the world's literature is Hebrew prophecy; it is the supreme literary product of this gifted race's genius.

1 Butcher, "Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects," p. 29.

NOTES. 1. The Historical Consciousness of the Hebrews. The sum of book-learning was small; men of all ranks mingled with that Oriental freedom which is so foreign to our habits; shrewd observation, a memory retentive of traditional lore, and the faculty of original reflection took the place of laborious study as the ground of acknowledged intellectual pre-eminence. SMITH, "The Prophets of Israel," P. 126.

Everything that befell Israel was interpreted by the prophets as a work of Jehovah's hand, displaying His character and will not an arbitrary character or a changeable will, but a fixed and consistent holy purpose, which has Israel for its object and seeks the true felicity of the nation, but at the same time is absolutely sovereign over Israel, and will not give way to Israel's desires or adapt itself to Israel's convenience. SMITH, The Prophets of Israel," p. 70.

2. The Nature of Prophecy. Of course by, prophecy is meant something broader and more rational than mere prediction of events; it is a spiritual presage based on a grounded interpretation of present conditions and tendencies. McCurdy thus defines it with primary reference to the Second Isaiah : "He did not, strictly speaking, foresee events; he saw conditions. Prediction is essentially a view of details, while the spiritual element in prophecy has primarily not to do with results, but with factors and principles and their divinely constituted inner relations." MCCURDY, "History, Prophecy, and the Monuments," Vol. III, p. 424.

II. THE HEBREW HERITAGE

A race's heritage, what it derives by bequest or endowment from its ancestral past, must be construed liberally. Not lands and property alone, not such wealth as the nation's industries have accumulated, but its inheritance of ideas and working energies, must be included. The Hebrew heritage, in this comprehensive sense, as the prophets and historians came to interpret it, was something quite unique in racial experience, and contained the germs of the nation's peculiar mission. Some salient factors of it must here be noted for their bearing on the development of their literature.