“Is life a simple art
      Of duties to be done,
    A game where each man takes his part,
      A race where all must run;
    A battle whose great scheme and scope
      They little care to know;
    Content, as men at arms, to cope
      Each with his fronting foe.”

Chapter X.

The Jewish Religion.

Sec. 1.  Palestine, and the Semitic Races. 
Sec. 2.  Abraham; or, Judaism as the family Worship of a Supreme Being. 
Sec. 3.  Moses; or, Judaism as the national Worship of a just and holy King. 
Sec. 4.  David; or, Judaism as the personal Worship of a Father and Friend. 
Sec. 5.  Solomon; or, the Religious Relapse. 
Sec. 6.  The Prophets; or, Judaism as the Hope of a spiritual and universal
Kingdom of God. 
Sec. 7.  Judaism as a Preparation for Christianity.

Sec. 1.  Palestine, and the Semitic Races.

Palestine is a word equivalent to Philistia, or the land of the Philistines.  A similar name for the coast region of Syria has been found on a monument in Nineveh,[336] and at Karnak in Egypt.[337] Josephus and Philo use the term “Palestine,” as applying to the Philistines; and the accurate learning of Milton appears in his using it in the same sense.[338] “The land of Canaan,” “The land of Israel,” and “Judaea” were the names afterward given to the territory of the children of Israel.  It is a small country, like others as famous; for it is only about one hundred and forty English miles in length, and forty in width.  It resembles Greece and Switzerland, not only in its small dimensions, but by being composed of valleys, separated by chains of mountains and by ranges of hills.  It was isolated by the great sea of sand on the east, and the Mediterranean on the west.  Sharply defined on the east, west, and south, it stretches indefinitely into Syria on the north.  It is a hilly, high-lying region, having all the characters of Greece except proximity to the sea, and all those of Switzerland except the height of the mountains.  Its valleys were well watered and fertile.  They mostly ran north and south; none opened a way across, Judaea to the Mediterranean.  This geographical fact assisted in the isolation of the country.  Two great routes of travel passed by its borders without entering its hills.  On the west the plains of Philistia were the highway of the Assyrian and Egyptian armies.  On the north the valley of the Orontes, separated by the chain of Lebanon from Palestine, allowed the people of Asia a free passage to the sea.  So, though surrounded by five great nations, all idolatrous,—­the Babylonians, Medes, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and Egyptians,—­the people of Judaea were enabled to develop their own character and institutions without much interference from without.  Inaccessible from the sea, and surrounded, like the Swiss, by the natural fortifications of their hills, like the Swiss they were also protected by their poverty from spoilers.  But being at the point of contact of three continents, they had (like the Mahommedans afterwards) great facilities for communicating their religious ideas to other nations.