Principles of western civilisation

VII THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 201

not begun to leave its record in history, we see being developed, amongst an agricultural people, who had already carried the arts of life to a high state of cultivation, the first outlines of the concept of monotheism. It is everywhere deeply overlaid in the general mind by those crude and gross concepts of the present and the material that are peculiar to the first stage of human evolution ; and it is only through the expositions of the higher minds that we catch sight at times, beneath this overgrowth, of the expression of the first contact of the human mind with that ascending process into which the sum of human activities is destined in time to be drawn. With progress ever continuing in the same direction, through the vicissitudes of peoples and races, we see the concept taking shape, and the expression of it growing clearer in the religious systems of the Eastern peoples who have come under its influence. Throughout a prolonged period, moreover, in which the record of the growth and purification of this concept is presented in the history of the Jewish people, we have clearly in sight a phenomenon of the first scientific interest ; namely, the development of an utterly opposing principle to that full, vigorous, and intense expression of the ascendency and efficiency of life, in all its uninterrupted play in the present, which was to reach its climax in the Greek ethos. We see the Hebrew spirit, in some of the finest passages in the literature of the race, rising in superior and eloquent scorn to all the works of an existing world resting on force. In the vision of universal justice which haunts the consciousness of the Jewish people throughout its history, it is the poor, the oppressed, the fallen, the weak, the disinherited,