God called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees and established him as a foundation upon which to build a nation. He chose him because of all the men then upon the earth, he as an inspired religious thinker was best fitted to restore faith in the world and the worship of the one God, because Abraham possessed within him that soil most congenial to the development and growth of the spiritual idea--Abraham is the spiritual father of the Jews, and they are the spiritual progenitors of all those nations, tribes and peoples who now acknowledge "A personal God, supreme and eternal in the universe which He created." In what does the greatness of the Jew consist? What great and lasting contribution has the Israelitish nation made to the development and progress of mankind? "The greatness of the Jew does not consist of political ascendancy, not in great attainments in the arts and sciences, nor in cities and fortresses and chariots and horses, nor in that outward splendor which will attract the gaze of the world, and thus provoke conquests and political combination and grand alliances and colonial settlements by which the capitol on Zion's hill would become another Rome or Tyre or Carthage or Athens or Alexandria, but quite another kind of greatness. It was to be moral and spiritual." This was the grand destiny of the Jewish race.
The Greeks gave us culture. God placed them in their little strip of island home, where the sky over head spoke to them both by night and by day of beauty--theirs was a land of widely extended coast line, having islands scattered like seeds in the midst of the Ægean sea, along the shores of which her poets mused while listening to the "multitudinous laughter of the sea." They had a landscape of mountain and valley, of river and sea and numberless bays--some "narrow enough for the butterflies to cross and yet navigable for the largest vessels." Wooed by the beauty of their landscape and clime, the Greeks gave to the world the highest expression of what culture could do for a people.
The Romans developed the idea of law and physical greatness. The world had never before had such masters as the Romans--her genius for government and ruling power has never been surpassed. Even in this new born time the laws that were nurtured are matured "upon the banks of the Tiber" still rule in the affairs of men. "It is for others to work brass into breathing shape. Others may be more eloquent or describe the circling movements of the heavens and tell the rising of the stars. Thy work, O Roman, is to rule the nations; these be thine acts, to impose the conditions of the world's peace, to show mercy to the fallen and to crush the proud."