Excerpt from The Dublin Review, Vol. 145: Quarterly Nos 290, 291; July October 1909 Ife, on the whole, is governed by certain great commonplaces which at our peril we forget. In pre vious articles I have drawn attention to the fact, con stantly disregarded by men who write Progress on their banners, that our civilization comes from the South, and that the adventurous Northern races found in Greeks and Romans the masters by whom they were educated. Athens will ever be the school of philosophy and science; Rome has never ceased to be the representative of law. But religion, however closely in touch with Plato by its theology, or with Justinian by its canons of discipline, is, and must remain, Hebrew till the world's end. The Hebrew, says De Quincey, by introducing himself to the secret places of the human heart, and sitting there as incubator over the awful germs of the spiritualities that connect man with unseen worlds, has perpetuated himself as a power in the human system; he is co-enduring with man's race, and careless of all revolutions in literature or in the composition of society. And St Paul - the recon ciler of East and West Israelites, to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the Law, and the service of God, and the pro mises; whose are the Fathers, and of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came.t Whether We like it or no, therefore, we Speak and think about religion in an Oriental language, not akin to the Teuton, most foreign in structure and movement to Latin, the antithesis of Greek by its essential form. It is curious to reflect that, whereas the Jew became our teacher and thereby planted his very idioms in the heart of Europe, there had been a day when his cousin, the Phoe nician, might have got the start of him. What would have happened after the defeat of Cannae if Hannibal had marched on Rome? Livy tells the tale of his refusing to *w0rk.r, vol. 11, 250, On Language. Tromans, ix, 4, 5. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.