Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/154

138 which it had battled against. All the people influenced by the culture of Greece and Rome, became Christians; the Germanic nations and the Slaves followed somewhat later. Persia and India alone, of the Indo-European race, preserved, much altered it is true, the old faith of their ancestors, owing to their religious institutions being strongly and closely allied to the State. The Brahmanic race, above all, rendered to the world a scientific service of the highest order, by the preservation, with an exuberance of minute and touching precaution, of the most ancient hymns of that worship, the Vedas.

The religious fertility of the Shemitic race was not yet exhausted. After this unequalled victory, Christianity, taken up by Greek and Latin civilization, had become the property of the West; the East, its birthplace, was just the place where it encountered the greatest obstacles. Arabia especially, towards the seventh century, could