The next question is, Why Israel should have been this singular and indispensable nation? When God selected Israel to serve His purpose, He did so, we are told, of His sovereign grace. But this strong thought, which forms the foundation of our prophet's assurance about his people, does not prevent him from dwelling also on Israel's natural capacity for religious service. This, too, was of God. Over and over again Israel hears Jehovah say: _I have created thee, I have formed thee, I have prepared thee_. One passage describes the nation's equipment for the office of a prophet; another their discipline for the life of a saint; and every now and then our prophet shows how far back he feels this preparation to have begun, even when the nation, as he puts it, was _still in the womb_. How easily these well-worn phrases slip over our lips! Yet they are not mere formulas. Modern research has put a new meaning into them, and taught us that Israel's _creation_, _forming_, _election_, _polishing_, _carriage_, and _defence_ were processes as real and measurable as any in natural or political history. For instance, when our prophet says that Israel's preparation began _from the womb,--I am thy moulder, saith Jehovah, from the womb_,--history takes us back to the pre-natal circumstance of the nation, and there exhibits it to us as already being tempered to a religious disposition and propensity. The Hebrews were of the Semitic stock. The _womb_ from which Israel sprang was a race of wandering shepherds, upon the hungry deserts of Arabia, where man's home is the flitting tent, hunger is his discipline for many months of the year, his only arts are those of speech and war, and in the long irremediable starvation there is nothing to do but to be patient and dream. Born in these deserts, the youth of the Semitic race, like the probation of their greatest prophets, was spent in a long fast, which lent their spirit a wonderful ease of detachment from the world and of religious imagination, and tempered their will to long suffering--though it touched their blood, too, with a rancorous heat that breaks out through the prevailing calm of every Semitic literature.[141] They were trained also in the desert's august style of eloquence. _He hath made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of His hand hath He hid me._[142] A "natural prophecy," as it has been called, is found in all the branches of the Semitic stock. No wonder that from this race there came forth the three great universal religions of mankind--that Moses and the prophets, John, Jesus Himself and Paul, and Mohammed were all of the seed of Shem.