Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/151

Rh If Judaism had been nothing but Pharisaism, it would have had no future. But this race possessed in itself a religious activity truly extraordinary. Moreover, like all great races, it nurtured opposite tendencies: it knew how to re-act against itself, and to acquire, where needed, qualities the most opposed to its defects. In the very midst of the tumultuous fermentation in which the Jewish nation was plunged, under the last Aramean princes, the most extraordinary moral event recorded in history came to pass in Galilee.

A man, to be compared with none other—so great indeed that, although every thing in these studies and in this place, should be viewed only by the light of Positive Science, I should be unwilling to contradict those who, struck by the exceptional character of his work, call him God—worked out a reform of Judaism, a reform of such depth, so individualized (si individuelle), that it was in truth a new creation in all its parts. Having attained a