your careful study. But it was at Alexandria that the Jewish Cabbalism
formed itself into a system. It was there that the Jews learnt to
become the jugglers and magic-mongers of the whole Roman world, till
Claudius had to expel them from Rome, as pests to rational and moral
society.

And yet, among these hapless pedants there lingered nobler thoughts and
hopes. They could not read the glorious heirlooms of their race without
finding in them records of antique greatness and virtue, of old
deliverances worked for their forefathers; and what seemed promises,
too, that that greatness should return. The notion that those promises
were conditional; that they expressed eternal moral laws, and declared
the consequences of obeying those laws, they had lost long ago. By
looking on themselves as exclusively and arbitrarily favoured by Heaven,
they were ruining their own moral sense. Things were not right or wrong
to them because Right was eternal and divine, and Wrong the
transgression of that eternal right. How could that be? For then the
right things the Gentiles seemed to do would be right and divine;--and
that supposition in their eyes was all but impious. None could do right
but themselves, for they only knew the law of God. So, right with them
had no absolute or universal ground, but was reduced in their minds to
the performance of certain acts commanded exclusively to them--a form of
ethics which rapidly sank into the most petty and frivolous casuistry as
to the outward performance of those acts. The sequel of those ethics is
known to all the world, in the spectacle of the most unrivalled
religiosity, and scrupulous respectability, combined with a more utter
absence of moral sense, in their most cultivated and learned men, than
the world has ever beheld before or since.

In such a state of mind it was impossible for them to look on their old