Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/160

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SHEMITIC CIVILIZATION.

religion, which is individual right, liberty, respect,—that belief which breathes a something divine into the heart of man. In the course of events, the progress of Indo-European nations will consist in separating itself more and more from the Shemitic mind. Our religion will retain less and less of Judaism; more and more will it resist all political organization in matters concerning the soul. It will become the religion of the heart,—the inmost poetry of each human being. In morality we shall attain to a delicate nicety unknown to the beings of the Old Alliance; we shall become more and more Christians. In politics we shall reconcile two things always ignored by Shemitic nations,—liberty, and a strong political organization. In poetry, we shall require an expression of that instinct of infinity which is at once our delight and our dread: in either case, our true nobility. In philosophy, instead of scholastic dogmatism, we shall open up vistas of the general system of the world. In short,