I also wish not to do to men." The Master said, “You have not attained to that."'

Such is the power of words, that those uttered by this intensely earnest man, whose work was ended only by death, have kept alive throughout the vast empire of China a reverence for the past and a sense of duty to the present which have made the Chinese the most orderly and moral people in the world. But to the mighty hopes that make us men,' they are strangers.

Theirs is a dull, plodding life, and one can hardly say of them what Pope wrote of the Indian :

'To be, contents his natural desire,

He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire,'

'

for their hold on life is slender, and it is a great matter with them to have their coffins ready. They, however, speak of the dead as ascended to the sky,' and have a great horror of being beheaded, in the belief that there can be no hereafter for a headless trunk.

It is only of late years, and that not by the best means, that parts of their vast empire have been entered by foreigners; but we must hope

that when the religion of Christ becomes known among them they will feel that it lends just that motive and aim to the life of man which their religions lack, and which is needed to make life complete.

CHAPTER XI.

THE SEMITIC NATIONS.

ALL that has been said about the common descent of the Aryan or Indo-European nations applies to the Semitic nations. Their languages are shown to be even more closely related than the Aryan languages and afford clear proof of a time when the ancestors of the Semitic peoples lived together, speaking the same tongue and worshipping the same gods. When further research is made we may look for as vivid a picture of old Semitic life as that which we have of old Aryan manners and customs.

Under the name Semitic or Shemitic, meaning people descended from Shem, one of the sons of Noah (a term which by no means truly describes them), there are included the Jews and other Syrian tribes, the Arabs, Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians and Carthaginians. Of the home from which the old Semitic races migrated we cannot speak with certainty; it may have been in

the country watered by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, or in some part of Arabia.

These nations have filled an important place in human history, but they have never spread themselves over the earth as have the Aryans. They have been great in religion, in science and in commerce, the cities which they founded, Jerusalem, Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, and their settlements in Carthage and Spain, reminding us what a splendid and deathless story their records tell.

In the ancient worship of the Semitic races before they separated, there are clear traces that the names of their chief gods had been fixed.

These names mostly express moral qualities; that is, instead of a god of fire, or storm, or sky, we have the Strong, the Exalted, the Lord, the King, etc. One of the highest and oldest names was El, meaning strong. It occurs in the Babylonian inscriptions as Ilu, God, and in the very name of Bab-il, the gate or temple of Il. We have it in Beth-el, the house of God, and in many other names. The same El was worshipped at Byblus by the Phoenicians and was called there 'the son of heaven and earth.' Eloah is the same word as the

Arabic Ilah, God: Ilah, without the article, means a god in general; with the article Al-Iláh or Allâh, it becomes the name of the God of Mohammad, as it was the name of the God of Abraham and of Moses.' Another famous name is Baal or Bel, the lord. He was not only a supreme god among the Assyrians, Babylonians and Phoenicians, but was a frequent object of worship by the Jews.

Then we have the Hebrew Melech, king, which is the Moloch of the Phoenicians, to whom children were sacrificed by their own parents, a horrible practice which they carried with them to Carthage and other places.

These and other names were common to the undivided Semitic people, but it is thought that the name Jah, Jahveh or Jehovah, was used by the Jews only. Be this as it may, 'Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic point to a common source as much as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.'

But the ancient history of the mighty empires of the East does not form part of my subject, and manuals of Jewish history especially are so numerous that it is needless to give what must be, at the best, only a meagre account.