BIOLOGICAL INFLUENCE OF RELIGION 47 



It has been said that " an unmixed race of a first-rate 

 organization are the aristocracy of Nature." Such a 

 line of development has been attributed to the Jews 

 through the " segregating genius of their great Law- 

 giver," and the code attributed to him, embodying the 

 national experience, seems to enshrine many profound 

 biological truths. 



The Hebrew nation were keenly conscious of an 

 Eternal purpose working amid them, and they also 

 realized the transient nature of each fleeting genera- 

 tion. Apparently without any definite belief in the 

 immortality of the individual soul, they could look 

 forward to and work for a national ideal which should 

 be accomplished long after they themselves had been 

 gathered to their forefathers. As befits dwellers in 

 open spaces, they were originally a highly imaginative 

 people, free from the necessity of embodying their 

 religious conceptions in concrete form, a process which 

 at once renders them liable to arrested growth and to 

 petrifaction. There is probably some intimate connec- 

 tion between a camping pastoral life and a monotheistic 

 form of religion, such as we find among the Jews and 

 the Arabs ; it is clear that idols and fixed shrines would 

 be singularly inconvenient things for a people who are 

 engaged in a wandering tribal existence. 



Even after the Jews became town-dwellers, their 

 isolation from and inherited sense of antagonism to 

 the surrounding peoples must have had a most 

 beneficial effect in preserving the racial atmosphere 

 and causing them to hand on unimpaired the national 

 traditions. 



Their history shows the survival value of a religion 



