All Indo-European antiquity had placed paradise in the beginning; all its poets had wept a vanished golden age.

Israel placed the age of gold in the future.

The perennial poesy of religious souls, the Psalms, blossomed from this exalted piety, with their divine and melancholy harmony.

Israel became truly and specially the people of God, while around it the pagan religions were more and more reduced, in Persia and Babylonia, to an official charlatanism, in Egypt and Syria to a gross idolatry, and in the Greek and Roman world to mere parade.

That which the Christian martyrs did in the first centuries of our era, that which the victims of persecuting orthodoxy have done, even in the bosom of Christianity, up to our time, the Jews did during the two centuries which preceded the Christian era.