ought to have been, as it must have been.

Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved for us
the Old Testament, while it restored to them a national centre, a sacred
city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans, Mecca to the
Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly absorbed by the
more civilised Eastern races among whom they had been scattered abroad as
colonies of captives.

Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect ensued:
Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire, and the East became
Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the head-quarters of
Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the Scriptures were not left
inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of
the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic
tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but
world-wide Hellenic speech, which was to the ancient world what French is
to the modern.

Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech. And under
the wide domination of that later Roman Empire--which had subdued and
organised the whole known world, save the Parthian descendants of those
old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers in their German forests
and on their Scandinavian shores--that Divine book was carried far and
wide, East and West, and South, from the heart of Abyssinia to the
mountains of Armenia, and to the isles of the ocean, beyond Britain
itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides.

And that book--so strangely coinciding with the old creed of the earlier
Persians--that book, long misunderstood, long overlain by the dust, and