Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/93

 hip and thigh, but that it produced Job, Isaiah, the Gospel of St. John and St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and that the whole course of its history was, despite constant stumbling and deplorable lapses, a long and painful struggle after righteousness as the power which exalteth a nation. Babylon and Assyria asserted their sway over vast hordes of people and limitless tracts of land, but the interest and admiration of the world is not for them but for the spiritual condition of their captives who

"By the rivers of Babylon 'There we sat down, yea, we wopt When we remembered Zion. Upon the willows in the midst thereof We hanged up our harps, For they that led us captive required of us songs.

How shall we sing the Lord's song In a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, Let my right hand forget its cunning."

Never, till the latest day, shall the world cease to interest itself in the history of the people who, in a strange land, thus remembered Zion. Likewise the interest of Greece for us to-day is not so much that Alexander swept