Every people finds laid upon it certain necessary activities, in most of
which all peoples find their common tasks. Every nation must cultivate
agriculture handicrafts, trade and commerce; must develop social,
political and religious institutions. Each people will, however, do some
one thing better than the rest of its tasks, better than it is done by
other peoples. Each great race has some commanding inspiration; some
ideal which masters every other aspiration and ambition, energizes its
efforts and shapes its destiny. It creates a specialty among the nations.
The real legacy of each great race lies in the works wrought in the line
of its highest aptitudes. Thus Rome developed a genius for civil
organization. She conquered the whole western world, united isolated
nations under one empire, cleared the Mediterranean for safe and free
communication, opened roads as arteries through the vast body politic,
established post communications for travellers and the mails, carried law
and order into every obscure hamlet, consolidated a polity which, by sheer
massiveness, lasted for generations after the soul of Rome had fled, and
left to posterity, in her institutes the basis for modern jurisprudence.
Thus Greece evolved a genius for art, developed architecture and sculpture
to the highest perfection the world has seen, made statues thicker than
men in Athens, made men more beautiful than statues, sighed even after
Virtue as the Becoming, the Perfect Beauty, left the world temples whose
ruins are inspirations, and marbles whose discovery dates the epochs of
culture. Israel essayed to do many things that other peoples achieved, and
promised success in more than one direction. At a certain period she bade
fair to develop into a martial empire, and to become a lesser Assyria or
Rome. A little later she seemed about to rival the Phenicians in
commerce. About the same time she
"advanced as far as the Greeks before Socrates towards producing an
independent science or philosophy."[19]
But she found herself content with none of these _rôles_. She had a higher
part assigned her in the drama of history, to which her secret instincts
resistlessly drew her. Her predominant characteristic was an intense
religiousness. Everything in the life of her people took on a serious and
devout tone. Patriotism was identified with piety. Her statesmen were
reformers, idealists, whose orations were sermons, like the speeches of
Gladstone in the Midlothian campaign, dealing with politics in the light
of eternal principles. Legislation was developed through the "judgments"
of priestly oracles. Poetry lighted her flames at the altar. Philosophy
busied itself with ethics. The Muse of History was the Spirit of Holiness.
The nation's ambitions were aspirations. Her heroes grew to be saints. The
divine became to her, not the true or the beautiful, but the good. She
evidently had, as Matthew Arnold said of John Wesley, "a genius for
godliness."