Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/141

 of a trackless desert, whereupon he may flit until his pursuers are weary of the chase. The resistance and persistence of the Israelite, and of the Jew, has implied loftier qualities, and deeper sentiments; for it has been maintained under the far more trying conditions of city life. It is one thing to scoff the tyrant from afar upon scorched illimitable sands:—it is another, to maintain moral courage, and to transmit the same spirit of heroism to sons and daughters, while buffeted and mocked in every villanous crowd of a city! So has the Jew held his own, and he has done this as the true descendant of the men with whom Jephtha, and Deborah, and Samuel, and David, had to do. The same man—man indeed we find him, in conflict with Antiochus, and when led and ruled by the Asmonean princes. Such did he show himself to the Roman proconsuls;—such was he as the problem of the imperial rule;—such toward the barbarian barons of mediæval Europe;—such, from first to last (last we must not say of the Jewish people) the man—firmer always in principle and in passive courage than that the iron and the fire should break his resolution.

The Israelite of the earliest period—the ages elapsing from the settlement in Palestine to the establishment of the monarchy, and onward—may be regarded as the genuine representative of constitutional social order; for his rule is—submission up to a limit, and resistance at all risks beyond that limit. He had no taste for anarchy; his inmost