VToC

Highest divinity,Dynast of endlessness,Timeless resplendency,Worshipped eternally,Lord of Infinity!

And the fact that Moses himself was married to an Egyptian woman and that"a mixed multitude" went up with the Jews out of Egypt shows that the narrow tribalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the regrettable rejection of the Samaritans, was but a temporary political necessity; while the subsequent admission into the canon of the book of "Ruth," with its moral of the descent of the Messiah himself from a Moabite woman, is an index that universalism was still unconquered. We have, in fact, the recurring clash of centripetal and centrifugal forces, and what assured the persistence and assures the ultimate triumph of the latter is that the race being one with the religion could not resist that religion's universal implications. If there were only a single God, and He a God of justice and the world, how could He be confined to Israel? The Mission couldnot but come. The true God, urges Mr. Wells, has no scorn or hatred for those who seek Him through idols. That is exactly what Ibn Gabirol said in 1050. But those blind seekers needed guiding. Religion, in fact, not race, has always been the governing principle in Jewish history. "I do not know the origin of the term Jew," says Dion Cassius, born in the second century. "The name is used, however, to designate all who observe the customs of this people, even though they be of different race." Where indeed lay the privilege of the Chosen People when the Talmud defined a non-idolater as a Jew, and ranked a Gentile learned in the Torah as greater than the High Priest? Such learned proselytes arose in Aquila and Theodotion each of whom made a Greekversion of the Bible; while the orthodox Jew hardly regards his Hebrew text as complete unless accompanied by the Aramaic version popularly ascribed to the proselyte Onkelos. The disagreeable references to proselytes in Rabbinic literature, the difficulties thrown in their way, and the grotesque conception of their status towards their former families, cannot counterbalance the fact, established by Radin in his learned work, "The Jews Among the Greeks and Romans," that there was a carefully planned effort of propaganda. Does not indeed Jesus tell the Pharisees: "Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte"? Do not Juvenal and Horace complain of this Judaising? Were not the Idumeans proselytised almost by force? "The Sabbath and theJewish fasts," says Lecky, doubtless following Josephus, "became familiar facts in all the great cities." And Josephus himself in that answer to Apion, which Judaism has strangely failed to rank as one of its greatest documents, declares in noble language: "There ought to be but one Temple for one God ... and this Temple common to all men, because He is the common God of all men."

It would be a very tough tribal God that could survive worshippers of this temper. An ancient Midrash taught that in the Temple there were seventy sacrifices offered for the seventy nations. For the mediæval and rationalist Maimonides the election of Israel scarcely exists—even the Messiah is only to be a righteous Conqueror, whose success will be the test ofhis genuineness. And Spinoza—though he, of course, is outside the development of the Synagogue proper—refused to see in the Jew any superiority save of the sociological system for ensuring his eternity. The comparatively modern Chassidism, anticipating Mazzini, teaches that every nation and language has a special channel through which it receives God's gifts. Of contemporary Reform Judaism, the motto "Have we not one father, hath not one God created us?" was formally adopted as the motto of the Congress of Religions at Washington. "The forces of democracyareIsrael," cries the American Jew, David Lubin, in an ultra-modern adaptation of the Talmudic scale of values. There is, in fact, through our post-biblical literature almost a note ofapology for the assumption of the Divine mission: perhaps it is as much the offspring of worldly prudence as of spiritual progress. The Talmud observed that the Law was only given to Israel because he was so peculiarly fierce he needed curbing. Abraham Ibn Daud at the beginning of the twelfth century urged that God had to reveal Himself to some nation to show that He did not hold Himself aloof from the universe, leaving its rule to the stars: it is the very argument as to the need for Christ employed by Mr. Balfour in his "Foundations of Belief." Crescas, in the fourteenth century, declared—like an earlier Buckle—that the excellence of the Jew sprang merely from the excellence of Palestine. Mr. Abelson, in his recent valuable book on Jewish mysticism,alleges that when Rabbi Akiba called the Jews "Sons of God" he meant only that all other nations were idolaters. But in reality Akiba meant what he said—what indeed had been said throughout the Bible from Deuteronomy downwards. In the words of Hosea:

When Israel was a child, then I loved him,And out of Egypt I called My son.

No evidence of the universalism of Israel's mission can away with the fact that it was stillhismission, the mission of a Chosen People. And this conviction, permeating and penetrating his whole literature and broidering itself with an Oriental exuberance of legendary fantasy, poetic or puerile, takes on in places an intimacy, sometimes touching in its tender mysticism,sometimes almost grotesque in its crude reminder to God that after all His own glory and reputation are bound up with His people's, and that He must not go too far in His chastisements lest the heathen mock. Reversed, this apprehension produced the concept of theChillul Hashem, "the profanation of the Name." Israel, in his turn, was in honour bound not to lower the reputation of the Deity, who had chosen him out. On the contrary, he was to promote theKiddush Hashem"the sanctification of the Name." Thus the doctrine of election made not for arrogance but for a sense ofNoblesse oblige. As the "Hymn of Glory" recited at New Year says in a more poetic sense: "His glory is on me and mine on Him." "He loves His people," says the hymn,"and inhabits their praises." Indeed, according to Schechter, the ancient Rabbis actually conceived God as existing only through Israel's continuous testimony and ceasing were Israel—per impossibile—to disappear. It is a mysticism not without affinity to Mr. Wells's. A Chassidic Rabbi, quoted by Mr. Wassilevsky, teaches in the same spirit that God and Israel, like Father and Son, are each incomplete without the other. In another passage of Hosea—a passage recited at the everyday winding of phylacteries—the imagery is of wedded lovers. "I will betroth thee unto Me for ever, Yea I will betroth thee unto Me in righteousness and in judgment and in loving-kindness and in mercy."

But it is in the glowing, poetic soul ofJehuda Ha-Levi that this election of Israel, like the passion for Palestine, finds its supreme and uncompromising expression. "Israel," declares the author of the "Cuzari" in a famous dictum, "is among the nations like the heart among the limbs." Do not imagine he referred to the heart as a pump, feeding the veins of the nations—Harvey was still five centuries in the future—he meant the heart as the centre of feeling and the symbol of the spirit. And examining the question why Israel had been thus chosen, he declares plumply that it is as little worthy of consideration as why the animals had not been created men. This is, of course, the only answer. The wind of creation and inspiration bloweth where it listeth. AsTennyson said in a similar connection:

And if it is so, so it is, you know,And if it be so, so be it!

But although, as with all other manifestations of genius, Science cannot tell us why the Jewish race was so endowed spiritually, it can show us by parallel cases that there is nothing unique in considering yourself a Chosen People—as indeed the accusation with which we began reminds us. And it can show us that a nation's assignment of a mission to itself is not a sudden growth. "Unlike any other nation," says the learned and saintly leader of Reform Judaism, Dr. Kohler, in his article on "Chosen People" in theJewish Encyclopædia, "the Jewish people began their career conscious of theirlife-purpose and world-duty as the priests and teachers of a universal religious truth." This is indeed a strange statement, and only on the theory that its author was expounding the biblical standpoint, and not his own, can it be reconciled with his general doctrine of progress and evolution in Hebrew thought. It would seem to accept the Sinaitic Covenant as a literal episode, and even to synchronise the Mission with it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peoples will, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was other than a symbolic summary of the national genius for religion, a sublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to other nations must have been evolved still later. "The conception or feeling of a mission grew up and wasdeveloped by slow degrees," says Mr. Montefiore, and this sounds much nearer the truth. For, as I said, history is the sole clue to the Bible—history, which according to Bacon, is "philosophy teaching by example." And the more modern the history is, and the nearer in time, the better we can understand it. We have before our very eyes the moving spectacle of the newest of nations setting herself through a President-Prophet the noblest mission ever formulated outside the Bible. Through another great prophet—sprung like Amos from the people—through Abraham Lincoln, America had already swept away slavery. I do not know exactly when she began to call herself "God's own country," but her National Anthem, "My Country, 'tis of thee," dating from1832, fixes the date when America, soon after the second war with England, which ended in 1814, consciously felt herself as a Holy Land; far as visitors like Dickens felt her from the perfection implied in her soaring Spread-Eagle rhetoric. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America merely for their own freedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others. From a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called "The Melting Pot," with its high universal mission, first at home and now over the world at large.

The stages of growth are still more clearly marked in English history. That national self-consciousness which to-day gives itself the mission of defending the liberties of mankind, and which stands in the breach undaunted and indomitable,began with that mere insular patriotism which finds such moving expression in the pæan of Shakespeare:

This happy breed of men, this little world,This precious stone set in the silver sea,. . . . . . .This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,. . . . . . .This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.

This sense of itself had been born only in the thirteenth century, and at first the growing consciousness of national power, though it soon developed an assurance of special protection—"the favour of the love of Heaven," wrote Milton in his "Areopagitica," "we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us"—was temperedby that humility still to be seen in the liturgy of its Church, which ascribes its victories not to the might of the English arm, but to the favour of God. But one hundred and twenty-five years after Shakespeare, the land which the Elizabethan translators of the Bible called "Our Sion," and whose mission, according to Milton, had been to sound forth "the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to all Europe," had sunk to the swaggering militarism that found expression in "Rule, Britannia."

When Britain first at Heaven's commandArose from out the azure main,This was the charter of the land,And guardian angels sung this strain:Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;Britons never will be slaves.The nations not so blest as thee72Must in their turn to tyrants fall;While thou shalt flourish, great and free,The dread and envy of them all.To thee belongs the rural reign,Thy cities shall with commerce shine:All thine shall be the subject main,And every shore it circles, thine.

When Britain first at Heaven's commandArose from out the azure main,This was the charter of the land,And guardian angels sung this strain:Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;Britons never will be slaves.

The nations not so blest as thee72Must in their turn to tyrants fall;While thou shalt flourish, great and free,The dread and envy of them all.

To thee belongs the rural reign,Thy cities shall with commerce shine:All thine shall be the subject main,And every shore it circles, thine.

It is the true expression of its period—a period which Sir John Seeley in his "Expansion of England" characterizes as the period of the struggle with France for the possession of India and the New World: there were no less than seven wars with France, for France had replaced Spain in that great competition of the five western maritime States of Europe for Transatlantic trade and colonies, in which Seeley sums up the bulk of two centuries of European history.Well may Mr. Chesterton point to the sinking of the Armada as the date when an Old Testament sense of being "answered in stormy oracles of air and sea" lowered Englishmen into a Chosen People. Shakespeare saw the sea serving England in the modest office of a moat: it was now to be the high-road of Empire. The Armada was shattered in 1588. In 1600 the East India Company is formed to trade all over the world. In 1606 is founded the British colony of Virginia and in 1620 New England. It helps us to understand the dual and conflicting energies stimulated in the atmosphere of celestial protection, if we recall that it was in 1604 that was initiated the great Elizabethan translation of the Bible.

In Cromwell, that typical Englishman,these two strands of impulse are seen united. Ever conceiving himself the servant of God, he seized Jamaica in a time of profound peace and in defiance of treaty. Was not Catholic Spain the enemy of God?Delenda est Carthagois his feeling towards the rival Holland. Miracles attend his battle. "The Lord by his Providence put a cloud over the Moon, thereby giving us the opportunity to draw off those horse." Yet this elect of God ruthlessly massacres surrendered Irish garrisons. "Sir," he writes with almost childish naïveté, "God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon shot." We do not need Carlyle's warning that he was not a hypocrite. Does not Marvell, lamenting his death, record in wordscuriously like Bismarck's that his deceased hero

The soldier taught that inward mail to wearAnd fearing God, how they should nothing fear?

The fact is that great and masterful souls identify themselves with the universe. And so do great and masterful nations. It is a dangerous tendency.

At the death of Queen Anne England stood at the top of the nations. But it was a greatness tainted by the slave-trade abroad, and poverty, ignorance, and gin-drinking at home. We recapture the atmosphere of "Rule, Britannia" when we recall that Thomson wrote it to the peals of the joy-bells and the flare of the bonfires by which the mob celebrated itsforcing Walpole into a war to safeguard British trade in the Spanish main. Seeley claims, indeed, that the growth of the Empire was always sub-conscious or semi-conscious at its best. This is not wholly true, for in "The Masque of Alfred" in which "Rule, Britannia" is enshrined, Thomson displays as keen and exact a sense of the lines of England's destiny as Seeley acquired by painful historic excogitation. For after a vision which irresistibly recalls the grosser Hebrew prophecies:

I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world:All nations serve thee; every foreign flood,Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames,

he points to the virgin shores "beyond the vast Atlantic surge" and cries:

This new world,Shook to its centre, trembles at her name:And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow77The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms.Britons, proceed, the subject deep command,Awe with your navies every hostile land.Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain:They rule the balanced world who rule the main.

This new world,Shook to its centre, trembles at her name:And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow77The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms.

Britons, proceed, the subject deep command,Awe with your navies every hostile land.Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain:They rule the balanced world who rule the main.

But you have only to remember that Seeley's famous book was written expressly to persuade the England of 1883notto give up India and the Colonies, to see how little "Rule, Britannia" expressed the truer soul of Britain. The purification of England which the Methodist movement began and which manifested itself, among other things, in sweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for the still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet arose, of a genius akin to that ofthe Old Testament, to spiritualize the doctrine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson is purely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as the visions of the Hebrew bards.

The Lord our God Most High,He hath made the deep as dry,He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.

But it is only as the instrument of His purpose, and that purpose is characteristically practical.

Keep ye the Law—be swift in all obedience;Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,Make ye sure to each his own,That he reap where he hath sown;By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.

And it is a true picture of British activities.Even thus has England on the whole ruled the territories into which adventure or economic motives drew her. The very Ambassador from Germany, Prince Lichnowsky, agrees with Rhodes that the salvation of mankind lies in British imperialism. But note how the less spiritual factors are ignored, how the prophet presents his people as a nation of pioneer martyrs, how the mission, finally become conscious of itself, gilds with backward rays the whole path of national advance, as the trail of light from the stern of a vessel gives the illusion that it has come by a shining road. Missions are not discovered till they are already in action. Not unlike those archers of whom the Talmud wittily says, they first shoot the arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe tothemselves purposes of which they were originally unconscious. First comes the tingling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour of retrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that that great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen friend, the poet Vernède, yet even he writes:—

God grant to us the old Armada weather.

Thomson was not poet enough—nor the eighteenth century naïve enough—tocreate a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that he throws "Rule, Britannia" eight centuries back to the time of Alfred the Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country's future is prophetically unrolled, serves to illustrate the retrospective habit of national missions.

The history of England is brief, and the mission evolved in her seven centuries has not yet finally shaped itself, is indeed now shaping itself afresh in the furnace of war. Her poets have not always troubled with the soul of her. They have often, as Courthope complained of Keats, turned away from her destinies to

Magic casements opening on the foamOf faëry lands in perilous seas forlorn.

But Israel had abundant time toperfect her conception of herself. From Moses to Ezra was over a thousand years, and the roots of the race are placed still earlier. Can we doubt it was by a process analogous to that we see at work in England, that Israel evolved into a People chosen for world-service? The Covenant of Israel was inscribed slowly in the Jewish heart: it had no more existence elsewhere than the New Covenant which Jeremiah announced the Lord would write there, no more objective reality than the Charter which Britain received when "first at Heaven's command" she "rose from out the azure main," or than thatContrat Socialby which Rousseau expressed the rights of the individual in society. But to say this is not to make the mission false. Ibsen might label thesevitalizing impulses "Life-illusions," but the criteria of objective truth do not apply to volitional verities. National missions become false only when nations are false to them. Nor does the gradualness of their evolution rob them of their mystery.Hamletis not less inspired because Shakespeare began as a writer of pothooks and hangers.

If it is suggested that to explain the Bible by men and nations under its spell is to reason in a circle, the answer is that the biblical vocabulary merely provides a medium of expression for a universal tendency. Claudian, addressing the Emperor Theodosius, wrote:—

O nimium dilecte deo, cui militat æther.

The Egyptian god Ammon, in the greatbattle epic of Rameses II, assured the monarch:—

Lo, I am with thee, my son; fear not, Ramessu Miammon!Ra, thy father, is with thee, his hand shall uphold thee in danger,More am I worth unto thee than thousands and thousands of soldiers.

The preamble to the modern Japanese Constitution declares it to be "in pursuance of a great policy co-extensive with the Heavens and the Earth."

Returning now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that "Germanism is Judaism," we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If Germanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Where it does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of its citizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves to great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has unfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the common British breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are rather with Japan than with Judæa. For in Japan,too, beneath all the romance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the individual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of those ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcely existed, which could expose infants or kill off old men because the State was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater scale of the mediæval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its subservient citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, has given a new reading to the Gospel: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

Nietzsche, who, though he strove to upset the old Hebrew values, saw clearly through the real Prussian peril, definedsuch a State as that "in which the slow suicide of all is called Life," and "a welcome service unto all preachers of death"—a cold, ill-smelling, monstrous idol. Nor is this the only affinity between Prussia and Japan. "We are," boasts a Japanese writer, "a people of the present and the Tangible, of the Broad Daylight and the Plainly Visible."

But Germany was not always thus. "High deeds, O Germans, are to come from you," wrote Wordsworth in his "Sonnets dedicated to Liberty." And it throws light upon the nature of Missions to recall that when she lay at the feet of Napoleon after Jena, the mission proclaimed for her by Fichte was one of peace and righteousness—to penetrate the life of humanity by her religion—and hedenounced the dreams of universal monarchy which would destroy national individuality. Calling on his people as "the consecrated and inspired ones of a Divine world-plan," "To you," he says, "out of all other modern nations the germs of human perfection are especially committed. It is yours to found an empire of mind and reason—to destroy the dominion of rude physical power as the ruler of the world." And throwing this mission backwards, he sees in what the outer world calls the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Goths and Huns the proof that the Germans have always stemmed the tide of tyrant domination. But Fichte belonged to the generation of Kant and Beethoven. Hegel, coming a little later, though as non-nationalist as Goethe, and a welcomerof the Napoleonic invasion, yet prophesied that if the Germans were once forced to cast off their inertia, they, "by preserving in their contact with outward things the intensity of their inner life, will perchance surpass their teachers": and in curiously prophetic language he called for a hero "to realize by blood and iron the political regeneration of Germany."

If Treitschke, too, believed in force, he had a high moral ideal for his nation. The other nations are feeble and decadent. Germany is to hold the sceptre of the nations, so as to ensure the peace of the world. It is only in Bernhardi that we find war in itself glorified as the stimulus of nations. Even this ideal has a perverted nobility; as Pol Arcas, a modern Greek writer, says: "If the devil knewhe had horns the cherubim would offer him their place." And though it was only in the swelled head of the conqueror that the brutal philosophy of the Will-to-Power germinated, it was not so much the "blood and iron" of Junkerdom that perverted Prussia—Junkerdom still lives simply—as the gross industrial prosperity that followed on the victory of 1870. A modern German author describes his countrymen—it is true he has turned Mohammedan, probably out of disgust—as tragically degenerated and turned into a gold-greedy, pleasure-seeking, title-hungry pack. This industrial transformation of the nobler soul of Germany is by Verhaeren—attacking Judaism from another angle—ascribed to its Jews, so it is comforting to remember that when England started theEast India Company there was scarcely a Jew in England. No, Germany is clearly where England was in the seventeenth century, and in Prussia England meets her past face to face. Her past, but infinitely more conscious and consequent than her "Rule, Britannia" period, with a ruthless logic that does not shrink from any conclusions. While England's right hand hardly knew what her left was doing, Germany's right hand is drawing up a philosophic justification of her sinister activities. There is in Henry James's posthumous novel—"The Sense of the Past"—a young man who gets locked up in the Past and cannot get back to his own era. This is the fate that now menaces civilization. Nor is the civilization that followed the struggle forAmerica by the scramble for Africa entirely blameless. Germany, federated too late for the first mêlée and smarting under centuries of humiliation—did not Louis XIV insolently seize Strassburg?—is avenging on our century the sins of the seventeenth.

So far from Germanism being synonymous with Judaism, its analogies are to be sought within the five maritime countries which preceded Germany, albeit less efficiently, in the path of militarism. It is the same alliance as prevailed everywhere between the traders and the armies and navies, and the Kaiser's crime consists mainly in turning back the movement of the world which through the Hague Conferences was approaching brotherhood, or at least a mitigation of the horrors of war.His blasphemies are no less archaic. He repeats Oliver Cromwell, but with less simplicity, while his artistic aspiration complicates the Puritan with the Cavalier. "From childhood," he is quoted as saying, "I have been under the influence of five men—Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Theodoric II, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon." No great man moulds himself thus like others. It is but a theatrical greatness. But anyhow none of these names are Jewish, and not thus were "the Kings of Jerusalem" even "six thousand years ago." Our kings had the dull duty of copying out and studying the Torah, and the Rabbis reminded monarchy that the Torah demands forty-eight qualifications, whereas royalty only thirty, and that the crown of a good name is the best of all.Compare the German National Anthem "Heil dir im Siegeskranz" with the noble prayer for the Jewish King in the seventy-second psalm, if you wish to understand the difference between Judaism and Germanism. This King, too, is to conquer his enemies, but he is also to redeem the needy from oppression and violence, "and precious will their blood be in his sight."

If I were asked to sum up in a word the essential difference between Judaism and Germanism, it would be the word "Recessional." While the prophets and historians of Germany monotonously glorify their nation, the Jewish writers as monotonously rebuke theirs. "You only have I known among all the families of the earth," says the message through Amos. "ThereforeI will visit upon you all your iniquities." The Bible, as I have said before, is an anti-Semitic book. "Israel is the villain, not the hero, of his own story." Alone among epics, it is out for truth, not high heroics. To flout thePharisees was not reserved for Jesus. "Behold, ye fast for strife and contention," said Isaiah, "and to smite with the fist of wickedness." While some German writers, not content with the great men Germany has so abundantly produced, vaunt that all others, from Jesus to Dante, from Montaigne to Michael Angelo, are of Teuton blood, Jewish literature unflinchingly exposes the flaws even of a Moses and a David. It is this passion for veracity unknown among other peoples—is even Washington's story told without gloss?—that gives false colour to the legend of Israel's ancient savagery. "The title of a nation to its territory," says Seeley, "is generally to be sought in primitive times and would be found, if we could recover it, to rest upon violence andmassacre." The dispossession of the Red Indian by America, of the Maori by New Zealand, is almost within living memory. But in national legends this universal process is sophisticated.

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento,

the Æneid told the all-invading Roman, putting of course the contemporary ideal backwards—as all missons are put—and into the prophetic mouth of Jove:—

Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem,Parcere subjectis et debelare superbos.

It was for similarly exalted purposes that Israel was to occupy Palestine, yet with what unique denigration the Bible turns upon him: "Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart dost thougo to possess this land; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee."

In English literature this note of "Recessional" was sounded long before Kipling. Milton, though he claimed that "God's manner" was to reveal himself "first to His Englishmen," added that they "mark not the methods of His counsel and are unworthy."

"Is India free," wrote Cowper, "or do we grind her still?" "Secure from actual warfare," sang Coleridge, "we have loved to swell the war-whoop." For Wordsworth England was simply the least evil of the nations. And Mr. Chesterton has just written a "History of England" in the very spirit of a Micah flagellating the classes "who loved fields and seized them."But if in Germany a voice of criticism breaks the chorus of self-adoration, it is usually from a Jew like Maximilian Harden, for Jews, as Ambassador Gerard testifies, represent almost the only real culture in Germany. I have been at pains to examine the literature of the German Synagogue, which if Germanism were Judiasm, ought to show a double dose of original sin. But so far from finding any swagger of a Chosen People, whether Jewish or German, I find in its most popular work—Lazarus's "Soziale Ethik im Judentum"—published as late as November, 1913, by the League of German Jews—a grave indictment of militarism. For the venerable philosopher, while justly explaining the glamour of the army by its subordination of the individual to thecommunal weal, yet pointed out emphatically that what unites individuals separates nations. "The work of justice shall be peace," he quotes from Isaiah. I am far from supposing that the old Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing is not still latent—indeed, we know that one Professor suggested at a recent Nietzsche anniversary that the Germans should try to rise not to Supermen but to Men, and that another now lies in prison for explaining in his "Biologie des Krieges" that the real objection to war is simply that it compels men to act unlike men. So that, when moreover we remember that the noblest and most practical treatise on "Perpetual Peace" came from that other German professor, Kant, the hope is not altogetherausgechlossenthat in the internalconvulsion that must follow the war, there may be an upheaval of that finer Germanism of which we should be only too proud to say that itisJudaism.

But meantime we are waiting, and the soul "waiteth for the Lord more than watchmen look for the morning, yea, more than watchmen for the morning." Again, as in earlier periods of history, the world lies in darkness, listening to the silence of God—a silence that can be felt.

"Watchmen, what of the night?" Such a blackness fell upon the ancient Jews when Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But, turning from empty apocalyptic visions, they drew in on themselves and created an inner Jerusalem, which has solaced and safeguarded them ever since. Such a blackness fell on theancient Christians when the Huns invaded Rome, and the young Christian world, robbed of its millennial hopes, began to wonder if perchance this was not the vengeance of the discarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St. Augustine to create an inner "City of God." How shall humanity meet this blackest crisis of all? What new "City of God" can it build on the tragic wreckage of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel no contribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus. And it was always an exaggerated quarrel—half misunderstanding, like most quarrels.Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was other than One. Jesus but applied to himself distributively—as logicians say—those conceptions of divine sonship and suffering service which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theology of atonement woven by Paul under Greek influences, either of them might have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism which its essential genius demands, and which even without them it only just missed. Is it not humiliating that Islam, whose Koran expressly recalls its obligation to our prophets, should have beaten them in the work of universalization? Maimonides acknowledged the good work done by Jesus and Mohammed in propagating the Bible. But if the universalism they achieved heldfaulty elements, is that any reason why the purer truth should shrink from universalization? Has Judaism less future than Buddhism—that religion of negation and monkery—whose sacred classics enjoin the Bhiksu to camp in and contemplate a cemetery? Has it less inspiration and optimism than that apocalyptic vision of the ultimate victory of Good which consoles the disciples of Zoroaster? If there is anything now discredited in its ancient Scriptures, the Synagogue can, as of yore, relegate it to the Apocrypha, even as it can enrich the canon with later expressions of the Hebrew genius. Its one possible rival, Islam, is, as Kuenen maintains, as sterile for the future as Buddhism, too irretrievably narrowed to the Arab mentality. But why, despite hismagnificent tribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the last word is with Christianity? Eucken, too, would call the future Christian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonement as injurious to religion, and the doctrine of the Trinity as a stumbling-block rather than a help. Abraham Lincoln being only a plain man, was not able to juggle with himself like a German theologian, and with the simplicity of greatness he confessed: "I have never united myself to any Church, because I have found difficulty in giving my assent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated statements of the Christian doctrine which characterize their Articles of Belief and Confessions of Faith." "When any church," he added, "will inscribe overits altar, as its sole qualification for membership, ... 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might, and thy neighbour as thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and with all my soul."

Can one read this and not wonder what Judaism has been about that Lincoln did not even know therewassuch a church? But call the coming religious reconstruction what you will, what do names matter when all humanity is crucified, what does anything matter but to save it from meaningless frictions and massacres? "Would that My people forgot Me and kept My commandments," says the Jerusalem Talmud. Too long has Israel been silent. "Who is blind," says the prophet, "butMy servant, or deaf as My messenger?" He is not deaf to-day, he is only dumb. But the voice of Jerusalem must be heard again when the new world-order is shaping. The Chosen People must choose. To be or not to be. "The religion of the Jews is indeed a light," said Coleridge in his "Table Talk," "but it is as the light of the glow-worm which gives no heat and illumines nothing but itself." Why let a sun sink into a glow-worm? And even a glow-worm should turn. It does not even pay—that prudent maxim of the Babylonian Talmud,Dina dimalchutha dina("In Rome do as the Romans"). Despite every effort of Jews as individual citizens the world still tends to see them as Crabbe saw them a century ago in his "Borough":—

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