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 RELIGIOUS REVIVAL 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED IN THE REFORM SYNAGOGUE AT BRADFORD 
 ON SATURDAY, MAY 2QTH, 1897, 
 
 BY 
 
 OSWALD JOHN SIMON. 
 
 Author of " Faith and Experience,'" " The World and the Cloister,' 1 
 " The Mission of Judaism" &>c., &>c. 
 
 of California 
 Regional Sott * m: 
 
 LANGLEY & SONS, EUSTON PRINTING WORKS, 
 GEORGE STREET, N.W.
 
 RELIGIOUS REVIVAL. 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED IN THE REFORM SYNAGOGUE AT BRADFORD 
 ON SATURDAY, MAY 29, 1897, 
 
 BY 
 
 OSWALD JOHN SIMON. 
 
 Author of " Faith and Experience" " The World and the Cloister" 
 " The Mission of Judaism," <&c., &>c* 
 
 LANGLEY & SONS, HUSTON PRINTING WORKS, 
 GEORGE STREET, N.W.
 
 IN HOMAGE AND TENDERNESS 
 TO THE HONOURED AND BELOVED MEMORY OF 
 
 MY FATHER, 
 
 THIS SERMON IS HUMBLY AND REVERENTLY 
 
 DEDICATED, 
 
 BEING ONE OF MY LAST TWO PUBLIC UTTERANCES 
 BEFORE HE WAS RECALLED, AND WHICH /I WAS 
 PERMITTED TO READ TO HIM, RECEIVING HIS 
 ASSURANCE THAT THE VIEWS HEREIN EXPRESSED 
 WERE IDENTICAL WITH THOSE WHICH HE HIMSELF 
 HAD EVER CHERISHED. 
 
 O. J. S. 
 
 " His glory is great in thy salvation; honour and 
 majesty hast thou laid upon him" 
 
 Psalm xxi., 5. 
 
 London, 
 
 15th July, 1897. 
 
 2086431
 
 The first chapter of MALACHI, llth verse: 
 
 " For from the rising of the sun even unto the 
 going down of the same my name is great among 
 the Gentiles ; and in every place incense is offered 
 unto my name, and a pure offering ; for my name 
 is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts" 
 
 (Revised version.) 
 
 HP HERE is no passage in the entire Hebrew 
 *" Bible more remarkable than this one. 
 Perhaps it is the most remarkable if not the most 
 striking. The words are spoken to Israel in the 
 name of God at a time when Israel was a nation in 
 the political sense as well as in the purely spiritual. 
 At a time, moreover, when Israel was the only 
 nation who seemed to have a knowledge of God. 
 The words were spoken, too, in circumstances in 
 which the people addressed had little conception of
 
 the truth that their God was the God of all people. 
 There was no nation of antiquity more exclusive 
 and more self-contained than were our ancestors in 
 the age when these words were uttered. The 
 general tendency of thought among the ancient 
 Israelites, though very different from the tendency 
 of their prophets and leaders, was in the direction 
 of national exclusiveness. The Jewish people in all 
 ages, owing to circumstances, have had a dangerous 
 disposition to forget that God was not only their 
 God, but that he was the " God of the spirits of all 
 flesh." And in our own time, despite emancipation 
 as well as dispersion, it is not every Israelite who 
 is in the habit of realizing that humanity is larger 
 and more important than race, and that religion 
 means union, and not separation. Many of us have 
 yet to learn that Jewish history and the Jews 
 themselves are but instruments in the scheme of 
 Providence for a purpose which shall be universal. 
 The present generation, more than any previous one, 
 has the power of acquiring a truer insight into the 
 object or, shall I say, into the genius of Jewish 
 history. If we are not in very truth what our 
 prophets have declared us to be, our continuance as 
 a distinct people would be no good at all, but 
 rather an evil. We are either the witnesses and 
 messengers of God to mankind, or we are nothing. 
 Unless we can help forward the religious idea, we 
 are worse than useless. We do not exist in our 
 separateness (such as it is in modern conditions),
 
 except as a means to an end. If we were to be no 
 more than a survival of an ancient caste which has 
 no particular part to play in modern civilization, 
 such as the gipsies, the sooner we were to merge 
 with the general population the better. Mere 
 separateness or exclusiveness or archaeology, where 
 they concern social life, are in themselves a positive 
 evil, and altogether opposed to the highest ideals. 
 
 The central idea in the Jewish Religion, whether 
 we call it a dogma, a doctrine, or a commandment, 
 is one which is particularly human and universal. 
 That idea obviously is God, and the love of God 
 with all the effort and power of the human will 
 There is nothing in this idea which people who are 
 not Jews are incapable of understanding, and of 
 making their own. Indeed, the highest and most 
 advanced religious conceptions among the best men 
 and women outside our own community or race 
 have taken the direction of making the love of God 
 the sum and substance of true religion. The glory 
 of the New Testament, in the estimation of what 
 we may call the most enlightened Christians, is that 
 all the four gospels agree in having attributed to 
 Jesus the saying that the love of God is the first 
 and greatest commandment. 
 
 It is of great consequence for the Jews to realize 
 that the central idea of the Jewish Faith, that of 
 the love of God, is also the supreme religious idea 
 of mankind. That which Jews in all ages have 
 prized as the simple yet sublime the intelligible
 
 8 
 
 but profound truth, which they have bound as a 
 sign upon their hands, as frontlets between their 
 eyes, written on their door posts, and uttered with 
 their dying breath is the substance of the highest 
 religious effort of which human nature is capable. 
 To make the love of God the ruling passion of life 
 is obviously the centre and core of the Jewish 
 Religion, and it is certainly the supreme object 
 which the best spiritual characters outside the 
 Jewish fold have before them. The power to love 
 the Divine Being with all one's heart, with all one's 
 soul, and with all one's might, is the gift of human 
 nature, irrespective of race and of sect. The Jews 
 have existed, and continue to exist, as a distinct 
 religious brotherhood or community, in order to 
 assist in the education of mankind in the cultivation 
 of this power to love God with all the ardour of 
 which human nature is capable. With this con- 
 viction, and with a burning enthusiasm for it, 
 no wonder that our prophets were impatient of the 
 obstinacy among our people, which hid from them 
 this great spiritual commandment, and permitted 
 ritual transactions and legalism to overlap and to 
 obscure the idea of loving God. It was natural 
 and reasonable to remind the Israelites that God 
 made himself known to other nations, and that 
 other nations were able to approach him with 
 pure offering. 
 
 You will say, perhaps, what is the use of 
 conforming to Judaism if the supreme idea of
 
 religion, namely, the love of God, is familiar to 
 people who are not Jews ? Or you will ask 
 what is the difference between Judaism (if that be 
 Judaism) and any other religion which teaches 
 that same idea ? The difference is not in the idea 
 itself, but in the teaching of it. The love of God 
 is not taught by any organized religious system 
 other than Judaism with the freshness, Avith the 
 originality, and with the genius with which Judaism 
 can teach it. It has taken Christianity eighteen 
 centuries even to comprehend it. And now at the 
 end of the nineteenth century those Christians who 
 best understand it have had to wend their wav 
 
 t/ 
 
 through a labyrinth of metaphysical difficulties in 
 order to gain a simple notion of it. You may say, 
 too, that Jews themselves have had to wend their 
 way through a labyrinth of ceremonial and ritual 
 customs and laws before they could arrive at so 
 simple a definition of their faith. Yes, but the two 
 cases are not alike, because the churches have 
 never presented this idea of the love of God in the 
 simple, undiluted way in which our religion has 
 done. The love of God in Christianity was 
 represented as a violent rupture which was taking 
 place in the Divine nature itself. He had alienated 
 his creatures and purchased them back by means 
 of a conflict between his infinite justice and his 
 infinite mercy; or, as the great. Christian Unitarian, 
 Dr. James Martineau, has written, " A foredoomed 
 race peopling a ruined world, which at the end of
 
 10 
 
 the ages had to be bought off at a frightful cost of 
 suffering to the Holiest of all."* 
 
 There is a difference between the supposed mani- 
 festation of the Divine Love in the Christian 
 conception of it and that of the Jewish religion. 
 The Fall and the Ransom are the two words in 
 Christian phraseology which represent the revela- 
 tion of God's love to mankind according to the 
 doctrine held by all the Christian churches. 
 Judaism, on the other hand, has never complicated 
 the question of God's relations to the world by the 
 introduction of that idea of the fall of man, from 
 which it was necessary that he should become 
 ransomed. The love of God, as we understand it, is 
 unfettered. It is not only free, as Christianity claims., 
 but it is independent of the grave intellectual 
 subtlety involved the moment we are called upon to 
 consider difficulties which must arise when it is 
 supposed that one part of God's moral nature is 
 in conflict with another. That stupendous Christian 
 mystery which is introduced by the statement that 
 God first doomed his creatures to a state of sin and 
 of hereditary guilt, and then performed an inconceiv- 
 able miracle as the only means of rescuing them 
 from that situation, is something very appalling to 
 the intelligence of mankind. The conception which 
 the Jewish Religion places before us as to the 
 
 * Address at Opening of Manchester College, Oxford, 
 October, 1893. (Longmans).
 
 11 
 
 relation of God to his creatures, is free from such 
 difficulties. 
 
 It is not all the same whether we get our 
 notions of the Divine Being, through Christianity 
 or through Judaism. Those who have had their 
 religious faculties awakened through the medium 
 of Christianity, have a far harder struggle than we 
 before they can realize that exalted truth which is 
 the watchword of all true religion, namely, the love 
 of God. I mention these things, my brethren, in 
 order to accentuate the fact that the Jewish 
 Religion is a heritage of rare and exceptional 
 spiritual value. Many Jewish people are quite 
 insensible to the sublime character of the Jewish 
 Faith. And we who are reformers must not 
 deceive ourselves with the impression that so-called 
 reform, as it is popularly understood, is any 
 guarantee whatever for a right apprehension of the 
 spirit of our faith. The words " reform " and 
 " orthodox " have very uncertain sounds. They do 
 by no means express what they imply. No 
 impartial student of modern Jewish history can 
 have observed reform in Germany and in England 
 without a feeling that its results after two or three 
 generations have been lamentably weak. The truth 
 is that reform has too frequently been altogether 
 misconceived. 
 
 Persons have joined a reform synagogue in a 
 great many cases both in German cities and in 
 London and Manchester (I know little or nothing
 
 12 
 
 of Bradford) without the least consideration of 
 what they were doing beyond the fact that they 
 were becoming members of an organization which 
 had very much relaxed its claim upon its members. 
 We are often taunted with the reflection that 
 reform is a stepping stone to infidelity. Nothing 
 could be more unjust or unsound from a critical 
 point of view. And it is quite admissible to meet 
 that taunt with the observation that many persons 
 who did not join reform synagogues abstained from 
 so doing only because they were not sufficiently 
 attached to the Jewish Religion to desire to see 
 the conditions of the presentation of it improved. 
 If we are to speak quite frankly on the momentous 
 question of the preservation of the Jewish Faith in 
 this country and in those other countries of Europe 
 where there has been political emancipation, we 
 cannot conceal from ourselves that the time has 
 come when reform must no longer be associated 
 with the idea of destruction. Reform must be 
 understood to signify construction, building up, 
 revival, stimulation. The great work of reform in 
 our day is to spiritualize our own people, to 
 make the Jewish Faith more living, more strong in 
 the hearts of our people, more of a reality, and 
 better known to the outer world. The destructive 
 process is only justifiable in so far as it is 
 necessary to clear away the cobwebs of time, the 
 exaggerations of ritual, the confusion of legalism. 
 We must in no case identify traditional customs or
 
 13 
 
 even Biblical ordinances with the faith of the 
 Israelite. The identification of two things which 
 ought to be kept always distinct, has been a serious 
 error in the past. An ideal reform Jew might be 
 observant of many quaint customs if he finds that 
 they are aids to the maintenance of religious 
 thought. Some no doubt iind certain observances 
 to act as hindrances. I suppose the greatest Jewish 
 reformer within the last two hundred years was 
 Moses Mendelssohn. And he certainly observed 
 many Jewish customs which you and I do not. We 
 want to get rid of that notion that reform means 
 merely the slackening of outward observance. 
 
 There are in the present generation great 
 possibilities of advancing the cause of religious 
 reform in England. But it can never succeed 
 unless it proceeds from the desire to re-construct, 
 to build up. The negative spirit in reform is its 
 canker, its poison. Reform has been permitted to 
 be associated with negative tendencies in the 
 Jewish mind, and not sufficiently with the affirma- 
 tive and the positive. 
 
 You in Bradford have great opportunities before 
 you. You have the advantage of living in a centre 
 of great intelligence, and you are surrounded by 
 communities in which freedom and religion have 
 been specially united and cultivated. There is 
 no part of Europe perhaps where the religious life 
 is more strongly developed, and where it is 
 accompanied with such a strong sense of political
 
 14 
 
 liberty, as in this great county of Yorkshire. The 
 spirit of the immortal Cromwell seems still to be 
 hovering about the district. There is no soil on 
 which religious reform can more fitly grow. And 
 many of you in this congregation have brought 
 with you from Germany the inestimable boon of 
 sound education. And you have also from your 
 native country the traditions of reform. 
 
 But if I may speak with perfect candour, I 
 would venture to point out that you are in an 
 exceptionally favourable position for detecting the 
 errors of reform both in Germany and in England. 
 Reform in Germany has in ways been more scientific 
 and logical than ours in London. On the other 
 hand, the reform movement in London fifty-five 
 years ago was, if I may so speak, as a son of one of 
 its chief pioneers, undertaken with a greater fulness 
 of spiritual aspiration. The alteration in the 
 manner of conducting public worship was more 
 striking in London than it was in Hamburg or 
 Leipsic, and perhaps constituted a wider gulf on 
 that account with the older methods than was the 
 case in Germany. Nevertheless, every individual 
 who engaged in it (I am speaking of the first batch 
 of founders of the Reform Synagogue in London) 
 were men of exceptional vigour, both spiritually and 
 intellectually. Not one of them entered the move- 
 ment from the negative impulse to which I have 
 already referred. The misfortune came later when 
 most of the original founders died off, and others
 
 15 
 
 joined the movement who were less ardent in the 
 spiritual cause in which reform is concerned. 
 
 In the present generation, we Jews have great 
 need to realize that the Jewish community exists 
 for no other purpose than the religious one. Do 
 not place it in the power of our Christian neigh- 
 bours to cite this text against us. The text which 
 I have used is a satire against our people. It 
 suggests that there is a danger of the Jews failing 
 in their mission and leaving to others who are not 
 Jew T s the discernment of eternal truth, when all 
 the while we were the first people to receive the 
 revelation of it for the enlightenment of mankind. 
 Oh, my brethren, it is a glorious privilege to have 
 been born an Israelite, with a spark of the 
 consciousness of that Divine trust which has been 
 imposed upon our race. But we can only hold our 
 own and remain worthy of our heritage if we keep 
 aglow in the midst of us the flame of faith, of trust. 
 of Divine idealism, which was poured into the 
 blood of our ancestors. 
 
 The future of Judaism in England, as in other 
 countries in which civil emancipation is accom- 
 plished, depends largely upon reform. Do not let 
 it be said that Judaism only thrives under the yoke 
 of oppression, and that when we become emancipated 
 we are alienated from our faith and from our 
 hereditary trust. Let us do our part to prove that 
 the emancipation of the Jews helps forward, and 
 does not retard the religious progress of mankind.
 
 ALMIGHTY GOD, Guardian of Israel, who slumbers 
 not nor sleeps, send out Thy light and Thy truth. 
 Make us to know the way wherein we should walk. 
 Let us ever offer unto Thee a pure offering of faith, 
 love, and sacred zeal. Make us worthy of our 
 sanctified ancestry, and may the whole world know 
 that before Thee every knee shall bend, and every 
 tongue swear, that Thy name may be great among 
 the nations, and that all mankind shall be united in 
 the common worship of the one Eternal Father, 
 the supreme fountain of love, wisdom, and truth. 
 Amen.
 
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