silver shekel was made as 13 to 10, such a coin would correspond very nearly to our florin 1[1]. Half a silver shekel was a drachma, and this was therefore the true ancestor of our shilling.
Again you may say that any attempt at fixing the relative value of silver and gold is, and always has been, a great mistake. Still it shows how closely the world is held together, and how, for good or for evil, we are what we are, not so much by ourselves as by the toil and rnoil of those who came before us, our true intellectual ancestors, whatever the blood may have been composed of that ran through their veins, or the bones which formed the rafters of their skulls.
And if it is true, with regard to religion, that no one could understand it and appreciate its full purport without knowing its origin and growth, that is, without knowing something of what the cuneiform inscriptions of Mesopotamia, the hieroglyphic and hieratic texts of Egypt, and the historical monuments of Phoenicia and Persia can alone reveal to us, it is equally true, with regard to all the other elements that constitute the whole of our intellectual life. If we are Jewish or Semitic in our religion, we are Greek in our philosophy. Roman in our politics, and Saxon in our morality, and it follows that a knowledge of the history of the Greeks, Romans, and Saxons, or of the now of civilization from Greece to Italy, and through Germany to these isles, forms an essential element in what is called a liberal, that is, an historical and rational education.
But then it might be said, Let this be enough. Let us know by all means all that deserves to be
- ↑ 1 Sim, the Persian word for silver, has also the meaning of one- thirteenth ; see Cunningham, 1. c. p. 165.
