The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah Vol 1 - Predestination

including the floating part of it—as numerooB as
that of Alexandria. But the wealth, the thought, and
the influence of Western Judaism centred in the
modem capital of the land of the Pharaohs. In those
days Greece was the land of the past, to which the
student might resort as the home of beauty and of
art, the time-hallowed temple of thought and of
poetry. But it was also the land of desolateness
and of ruins, where fields of com waved over the
remains of classic antiquity. The ancient Greeks
had in great measure sunk to a nation of traders, in
keen competition with the Jews. Indeed, Roman
sway had levelled the ancient world, and buried
its national characteristics. It was otherwise in the
far East; it was otherwise also in Egypt. Egypt was
not a land to be largely inhabited, or to be *
civilised' in the then sense of the term: soil,
climate, history, nature forbade it. Still, as now,
and even more than now, was it the dream-land of
untold attractions to the traveller. The ancient,
mysterious Nile still rolled its healing waters out
into the blue sea, where (so it was supposed) they
changed its taste within a radius farther than the