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 Lifornia 
 
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 Price 50 Cents.
 
 Glint-Lights 
 
 ON THE; 
 
 en Commandments 
 
 Before the Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, 
 Philadelphia, 
 
 BY 
 
 RABBI JOSEPH KRAtfSKOPF, D. D. 
 
 CONTENTS : 
 
 I. Ancient and Modern Idolatry. 
 II. The Law of Retribution. 
 
 III. Reverence to whom Reverence belongs. 
 
 IV. Through Labor to Rest. 
 
 V. Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs. 
 
 VI. Slay the Sin, but not the Sinner. 
 
 VII. The Sanctity of the Home. 
 
 VIII. The Noblest Title : An "Honest Man." 
 
 IX. The Highest Fame: A "Good Name." 
 
 X. A Plea for Noble Ambition. . 
 
 PHILADELPHIA : 
 OSCAR KLONOWER Publisher.
 
 WORKS BY RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 
 THE JEWS AND MOORS IN SPAIN. 
 
 A Romance and a History. 8vo., 246 pages. Cloth bound 
 
 Chapter I A Day in Cordova. 
 
 II Europe during the Dark Ages. 
 
 Ill Continued. 
 
 IV Return to Cordova. 
 
 V The Arab-Moors. 
 
 VI A Sabbath Eve in Cordova. 
 
 VII Continued. 
 
 VIII Entrance of Jews into Europe. 
 
 IX Entrance of the Jews into Spain 
 
 Si. oo 
 
 CONTENTS: 
 
 Ckapter X Their Position in Medical Science 
 ' XI In the Sciences. 
 XII In Literature. 
 XIII In Philosophy. 
 XIV In the Industries. 
 XV The Inquisition. 
 XVI The Expulsion of the Jews. 
 XVII The Dispersion of the Jews. 
 XVIlI-Effect of the Expulsion. 
 
 EVOLUTION AND JUDAISM. 
 
 8vo., 342 pages. Cloth bound 
 
 I. The Dynamic and the Static Force of 
 
 Religion 
 
 II. Evolution and the Bible. 
 
 III. Creation and the Bible. 
 
 IV. Matter and Force. 
 
 V. The Nebular Hypothesis. 
 
 VI. Darwinism. 
 
 VII. Primeval Man. 
 
 VIII. Evolution of Man, Intellectually. 
 
 IX. Evolution of Man, Socially. 
 
 CON? 1 
 
 ENTS 
 
 
 "'orce of 
 
 X. 
 
 Evolution of Man, Religiously. 
 
 
 XI. 
 
 Evolution of Man, Morally. 
 
 
 XII. 
 
 Evolution of God. 
 
 
 XIII 
 
 Evolution of Immortality. 
 
 
 XIV. 
 XV. 
 
 Evolution of Worship 
 Evolution of Judaism. 
 
 
 XVI. 
 
 Summary. 
 
 
 
 Glossary. 
 
 r. 
 
 
 Index 
 
 SUNDA Y LECTURES. 
 
 Series V. 
 Rabbi..... 
 
 1891-189*. Neatly bound in Cloth, Gilt Edges, with engraving of the 
 
 CONTENTS: 
 
 Theologies many Religion one. 
 
 Who wrote the Pentateuch? 
 
 Shylock, the unhistoric Jew. 
 
 Nathan, the Wise the historic Jew. 
 
 Darkness before the Dawn. 
 
 On the Threshold. 
 
 Illusion. (Dreams, Visions, etc.) 
 
 Delusion. (Hypnotism, Faith-Cure, etc.) 
 
 Hallucination. (Ghosts, Spiritualism, etc.) 
 
 Jesus in the Synagogue. 
 
 To-Day better than Yesterday. 
 
 Wanted A Rational Religious School. 
 
 Civilization's Debt to Woman. 
 
 Civilization's Duty to Woman. 
 
 "There's a Divinity that shapes our ends." 
 
 16. Justice Not Charity. 
 
 17. A Personal Interest Society. 
 
 Glint-Lights on The Ten Commandments. 
 
 18. I. Ancient and Modern Idolatry. 
 
 19. II. The Law of Retribution. 
 
 20. III. Reverence to whom Reverencebelongs 
 
 21. IV. Through Labor to Rest. 
 
 32. V. Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs 
 23 VI. Slay the Sin, but not the Sinner. 
 
 24. VII. The Sanctity of the Home. 
 
 25. VIII. The Noblest Title: An "Honest Man." 
 
 26. IX. The Highest Fame: A "Good Name." 
 
 27. X. A Plea for Noble Ambition. 
 
 28. The Old in the New and The New in the Old. 
 
 JEWISH CONVERTS, PERVERTS AND DISSENTERS. 
 
 CONTENTS: 
 
 I. True and False Converts. 
 
 II. Jesus A Jew, and not a Christian. 
 
 III. Paul The Jew and the Gentile. 
 
 IV. Forced Converts. 
 
 V. Allured Perverts. 
 
 VI Spinoza Not a Convert nor a Pervert. 
 
 VII. Brilliant Women -Ignoble Perverts. 
 
 Pamphlet form 50 cents. 
 
 VIII. Boerne and Heine Perverts through 
 
 Christian Intolerance. 
 
 IX. Isaac Disraeli A Pervert through 
 
 Jewish Intolerance. 
 
 X. Benj. Disraeli-A Convert and yet a Jew 
 
 XI. The Blank Leaf between the Old and 
 
 the New Testament. 
 
 THE SERVICE RITUAL. Composed of thirty completely different English 
 Services, including Hymns, suitable for Friday evening or Sunday morning 
 
 services, and also for home service, izmo , 205 pages. Cloth bound $ .50 
 
 Bound in Morocco. Gilt Edges i.oo 
 
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 and will be sent on Receipt of Price to any part of the D. S. and Canada.
 
 Ancient and Modern Idolatry 
 
 RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 
 Philadelphia, February jrx/. iSgz. 
 
 Exod. xx. 3. D'-inx DTI^X ]*? iTrv X^ 
 
 It was a sad day, that fatal Sabbath, when Pompey arid his -legions 
 battered down the Temple-walls of Jerusalem, slew 12,000 patriots within 
 its gates, and made Judea a vassal and tributary of Rome. 
 For yet another cause that day was sad, perhaps saddest HoHes'empty 
 for that cause. The enemy had desecrated the sanctuary. 
 Into the Holy of Holies, into which not even the Israelite, not even the 
 under-priest, was permitted to set his foot, no one save the High Priest, 
 and he only once a year for a few moments, on the sacred Atonement- 
 Day, Pompey and his soldiers had forced their way, had lifted its veil with 
 profane hand, to feast their eyes on the sights and mysteries behind. But, 
 the disappointment of the Romans was even greater than the consterna- 
 tion of the Jews. They had expected to behold wonderful sights, and they 
 saw nothing. The space was filled with emptiness.* 
 
 Yes, empty was the space within the Holy of Holies. Even the Holy 
 Ark, with its two granite tablets on which were graven the Ten. Command- 
 ments, was no longer there. Only the foundation stones 
 
 Yet filled with 
 were there to designate the place where it had stood. It the presence of ' 
 
 had disappeared at the time of the Babylonian Captivity, jehovah' 1 ^ 
 some five hundred years before. But, though empty to 
 the Roman, for the Jew it was filled with the presence and glory of his 
 invisible and incorporeal God. Though Pompey saw nothing: there, the 
 High Priest saw more and felt more during his annual few minutes' pres- 
 ence within that awful precinct than all the Greek and Roman masters 
 could have sculptured into stone or painted on canvas. There was the 
 spiritual abode of Jehovah. There the people, represented in their High 
 Priest, stood face to face with their God. The emptiness and loneliness 
 and darkness of the place was overawing. For days in advance the High 
 Priest got himself in spiritual readiness for that annual entrance into the 
 Holy of Holies, for the purpose of making intercession for his people. 
 When the hour came, he entered it with trembling foot, and whert behind 
 the veil, the people without waited in breathless suspense, for it had 
 occurred that alarm and terror so overwhelmed the High Priest within 
 that awful precinct, that he never returned from it alive. 
 
 * Josephus : Antiquities, XIV, Chap, iv, 3-4 ; Tacitus : Historiaf, v.
 
 I 
 
 yes, empty was the Holiest Place of the Sanctuary of Jerusalem, and 
 dark. Except for the moment, when the High Priest lifted the veil to 
 
 pass into it, and when the space reflected the crimson 
 Though dark ~. , 
 and empty it has light that arose from the censer on which the incense 
 
 Sited the d earth. burnt, not a ray of light entered it all the year. And yet 
 from out that darkness there has issued a light that has 
 illumined the earth. The small shrine, that once alone afforded dwelling- 
 place to the invisible God of the Universe, has broadened its confines till 
 now it embraces our whole globe. The name Jehovah, that then was 
 uttered but once a year by a single priest, in but a single sanctuary, is 
 uttered now, with reverence and in worship, in thousands of sanctuaries, 
 by hundreds of millions of people, all over the world. The God of the 
 Jews,, that to the Romans seemed so poor as not to be able to command 
 the service of a single sculptor or painter, has overthrown the proudest 
 products of the ancient masters, has driven the sculptured and painted 
 gods and goddesses of the Pantheons into the Museum, and has put into 
 their places those master-builders of modern civilization, who toiled and 
 achieved in the service of the Unseen God. 
 
 We are not surprised at the Roman's amazement over the emptiness 
 of the Holy of Holies, over the absence of idols in the sanctuary of Jeru- 
 salem, and his ridiculing the Jews for worshipping ' noth- 
 iegod. in ? but clouds.' Worship, without a vivid conception 
 and an actual perception of the object worshipped, seemed 
 impossible to the Roman. Homer had spoiled the Greeks and their 
 Roman heirs for theological^bstractions. They had to have their Mount 
 Olympus, had to people it with gods and goddesses, very much like them- 
 selves, of similar virtues and failings, and had to surround themselves 
 with images of them in their Temples, on their public squares, in their 
 ' homes. And unless they had thus surrounded themselves with visible 
 and tangible gods, they never would have worshipped at all. Their mind 
 was still in that child-like state, that needs the picture in the book to 
 explain the text, or to take the place of the text altogether, that endows 
 its toy with life, animates the inanimate, and talks to it as if it were a 
 being alive. 
 
 Not so 'with the Jew. He had passed his childhood-days long before 
 the name of Greek and Roman was even heard of. Before these had yet 
 
 begun their spelling lessons, he had already delved into 
 Mature Jewish & 
 
 mind grasps an profound theological abstractions. A thousand years 
 
 idea?"* G0d before Homer sang of the wars and follies and foibles 
 of the gods and goddesses, Abraham prostrated himself 
 before Jehovah. Fifteen hundred years before the Roman soldier mar- 
 velled at the absence of images in the Holy of Holies, Moses had placed 
 his prohibition against idolatry at the head of his Ten Commandments. 
 Long before Rome built her scores of Temples to as many different gods, 
 under the charge of as many different sets of priesthoods, and ornamented 
 them, within and without, with no end of images of every size and shape 
 and form, the Jew proclaimed and worshipped the one, invisible, and
 
 universal God, taught that no finite mind shall perceive, or can conceive, 
 the Infinite, held every attempt at picturing a God, who is as eternal as 
 time, as universal as space, to be a blasphemy against God, and a griev- 
 ous injury to man. 
 
 He had learned from experiences of his own, and from observations 
 among others, that idolatry thwarts the development of mind. It places 
 
 a piece of wood or stone an animal or a human being in 
 
 Idolatry thwarts 
 front of man and says : This is your god, this the author development of 
 
 and keeper of the universe, such and such his attributes, mind and heart ' 
 this believe, and further seek not. The great mysteries that encompass 
 man being thus easily disposed of, the mind gives itself no further trouble 
 about ferreting out the awful and the everlasting secret, and one of the 
 greatest stimuli to thought is withdrawn from it. Worship becomes a 
 mechanical exercise. It is a must not a desire; a fear not an inspira- 
 tion. The ubiquitous presence of the images lessens the heart's awe 
 before them, begets that familiarity that breeds contempt. And a god- 
 belief with little in it to set the mind to thinking, and to inspire the heart 
 with awe, develops poor specimens of worshippers. 
 
 The Jew, therefore, early took his God out of the realm of matter, 
 and put Him into the realm of pure thought, abstracted Him beyond 
 
 every possibility of visible or tangible representation, 
 
 ' An invisible God 
 made Him a subject of speculation rather than of knowl- a constant stimu- 
 
 edge, a Being, whose nature and essence are never to be mi/dde'velop^' 1 
 known, only to be conjectured through His rnanifesta- merit, 
 tions in the material world without, and in the spiritual world within. 
 Never seen, and but faintly conceived, He continued to be the great mys- 
 tery, that constantly drew the mind of man towards attempting solutions, 
 towards tracing His hand-writing in the great volume of Nature, or feel- 
 ing the pulsations of His existence in the growing harvests, in the rolling 
 oceans, in the revolving planets, in the roaring thunder, in the still small 
 voice of conscience, in the destinies of nations, in the fates of people. 
 Here was a mine of thought, which the research of all the centuries since 
 has not succeeded to exhaust. Here was revelation enough to constantly 
 urge the mind to new inquiries, and enough of wonder and glory, of 
 evidences of Divine guidance and of fatherly design and forethought, to 
 keep heart and soul in constant awe and reverence. 
 
 The influence, which this prohibition against having any other God 
 than the invisible, incomprehensible Jehovah, with its implied command, 
 
 and included necessity for constant search after His true 
 
 ' The God-idea of 
 
 nature and essence, had on the preservation and develop- the jews made of 
 
 ment of the people of Israel, can not be overestimated, thfnkers^and^ 
 
 It made of them a people of reasoners, a profoundly reli- preserved them 
 
 , . - , . as a people, 
 
 gious race, and against such a people the surrounding 
 
 idolatrous nations strove in vain. They had not the leisure for wars of 
 conquest, nor the time for fostering the arts. They had theological schools 
 to found and immortal works to write. Theirs was not a ready-made God 
 in whom they had but to believe. They had to find their God, to solve
 
 the problem of His existence, of His nature and essence. And the con- 
 clusions they arrived at were too dearly bought to be surrendered at the 
 enemy's demand. They could take their country, their all, their life, but 
 not their God. They could make them bow before tyrants but never 
 before idols. They could take their rights but not their belief. They 
 could violate their homes and tear their dearest from them, and, if power- 
 less, they would bear their misfortune resignedly; but when they attempted 
 to violate their Temples, to sacrifice there to a heathen god, or to erect 
 there an image, or to pass through the streets of Jerusalem bearing images, 
 even if but an emperor's effigy on their standards, they would rise in all 
 their might and fury, even against overwhelming numbers, and heroically 
 fight for their God, where they might not have raised as much as a finger 
 to fight for themselves. 
 
 I would be guilty, however, of inaccuracy or partiality, were I to lead 
 you to believe, that the ancient Jews were always wholly free from idol- 
 atrous beliefs and practices. The absence of images from 
 Jews, however, 
 not always abso- a place of worship argues as little the presence of pure 
 
 nor others abso- monotheism, as the presence of images proves absolute 
 lute polytheists. polytheism. Many a pagan writer has left behind hymns 
 and prayers, through which breathes a purer monotheism than through 
 the writings of many a monotheistic scribe. If we analyze the polythe- 
 istic system carefully, we have even no difficulty of tracing a monothe- 
 istic undercurrent through most of them, especially during their earlier 
 stages. They recognize one Chief God, no matter how many minor gods 
 they- acknowledge. And to that Chief God they generally ascribe attri- 
 butes aftd powers, such as the ancient Jews ascribed to the God they 
 worshipped. Some of the minor gods seem to have stood at first for other 
 names, or for the attributes, of the Chief God, till their origin was for- 
 gotten, and they became independent personalities, till such different 
 appellations of the same Deity as " the Ruler," "the Most High," "the 
 Almighty," "the Eternal," "the Lord," "the Creator," came to be 
 looked upon as different and independent deities. 
 
 In the Old Testament, too, there are traces of such mistakings of the 
 different attributes or names of the same Supreme Power for different 
 
 gods. The different tribes seem to have had, at first, their 
 Un-monolheistic ... 
 
 God-conception own tutelar gods. When they consolidated into a nation, 
 
 tonfan exfle Baby " thev seem to have combined their different gods into a 
 group, under the name of Elohim (gods), and later on 
 merged this group into One God, under the name of Jehovah, frequently 
 in conjunction with the group-name Elohim. Till the Babylonian cap- 
 tivity, however, the back-slidings into polytheism and the worship of 
 many gods were frequent. "According to the number of thy cities are 
 thy gods, O Judah " lamented the prophet Jeremiah. Not content with 
 returning to the worship of their own earlier gods, they frequently fol- 
 lowed '.the gods of the surrounding people, and imitated their idolatrous 
 practices.* And even when faithful to the One God, their conception of 
 
 *See Judges rvii ; I Kings xi, xii ; II Kings xx ; Ezek. viii, 3-12.
 
 Him, often differs little, if any, from the anthropomorphistic conceptions 
 of the polytheistic peoples. God is represented as walking on earth and 
 holding conversations with man, as shutting the door of the ark behind 
 Noah, as coming down to see the city and tower that man had built, as 
 smelling the sweet savor of bloody sacrifice, as tempting Abraham to slay 
 his son, as drawing the design of the Tabernacle, and the pattern of the 
 priestly garments, as conniving with treachery and crime, as indulging 
 in violent outbursts of passion, and in frightful attacks of cruelty, often 
 for very slight offenses. It was Jehovah they worshipped, not in the sense 
 of an incorporeal, incomprehensible spirit, but as an absolute Oriental 
 tyrant. Moses overestimated their mental capacity, when he asked them 
 to cast aside idolatry, as he himself, and the prophets many centuries after 
 him learned to their sorrow. Not till a thousand years later, not till after 
 their return from the Babylonian captivity, not till they had passed from 
 their period of childhood and youth into mature age, could they be 
 weaned from their own earlier gods, or from the idols of the surrounding 
 nations. 
 
 And even after that, the idolatrous spirit clung to them, and with but 
 few exceptions has not left them to this day. They ceased, indeed, to 
 worship other gods, and they have remained heroically un-monotheistic 
 faithful to Jehovah ever since. But they connected the SkSSteSS?"* 
 worship of Him with rites and ceremonies that once exile, 
 belonged to idols, and to these rites and ceremonies they attached an 
 importance and a sanctity, which in course of time turned them into an 
 idolatry. The service at the Temple of Jerusalem presented the strange 
 anomaly of a monotheistic God in a polytheistic garb, of an idolatrous 
 -worship of a spiritual abstraction, of ascribing human attributes to an 
 invisible, incorporeal, incomprehensible Being. In the same breath, 
 in which they spoke of Jehovah as the Universal Father, they appro- 
 priated Him exclusively for themselves. They declared : the Heaven of 
 Heavens could not contain Him, and yet shut Him in within their Holy 
 of Holies. They spoke of Him as the One and Only God, and yet on the 
 Atonement-Day they sent the scape-goat into the wilderness to appease 
 the demons The}^ spoke of Him as a God of love and mercy, and yet 
 crouched and trembled before Him, as if He were some cruel tyrant, and 
 the Temple-mount daily reeked with the blood of innocent animals, sacri- 
 ficed to appease His anger or to bribe His favor. 
 
 It is only too true, that with the cessation of one idolatry after the 
 Babylonian captivity, another one sprang up, which, if not as debasing as 
 
 its predecessor, has proved itself more ineradicable. The 
 
 God-idolatries 
 
 intentions of the puritanic Ezra, very likely, were the replaced by cere- 
 best. To keep the people from any further back-slidings monial idolatries 
 into idolatrous beliefs and practices, he chained them, hand and foot, 
 heart and soul, to a mass of rigid forms and rites and ceremonies, from 
 which it was almost impossible to break away. They effected their object, 
 t>etter perhaps than even Ezra had anticipated, better perhaps than he 
 .had desired. Israel never again slid back into idol-worship. They had
 
 no occasion to, for they had turned their forms and rites and ceremonies 
 into an idolatry. 
 
 Of the Torah, the Pentateuch-Scroll, they made an idol, and they 
 accorded it a sanctity amounting to worship. They even spoke of it as 
 a Spiritual Being, They decked it with the finest fabrics, 
 The Scro ^" olat and ornamented it with the costliest metals and jewels. 
 The place it occupied in the synagogue became the Holy 
 of Holies, and its taking from the shrine constituted the height and glory 
 of the service. To touch it with unclean hands meant its pollution, to drop 
 it to the ground, required a fast of the congregation in expiation. They 
 carried it about in the synagogue like an idol, and they crowded to touch 
 or kiss it. Woman was never to touch it, not even to come near it, it 
 was too holy for such creatures as she. And as to its contents, that was 
 regarded from beginning to end the work and word of God, that required 
 implicit belief, and unquestioning observance. To doubt a word of it 
 had excommunication for its consequence. For temporary institutions 
 and local laws an eternal and universal obedience was demanded. And, 
 as if it did not already contain more commands and more prohibitions 
 than the average man could live up to, they turned and twisted words 
 and letters and dots into new commands and new prohibitions, until they 
 made life a hardship, and religion a torture. 
 
 The Sabbath, that had been instituted for rest and. recreation and 
 pleasure, was changed into a day of endless restrictions. Like the Pen- 
 tateuch, it* was turned into an idol. And a gloomy idol 
 The Sabbath-^ it was From sunset o f Friday to sunset of Saturday the 
 Jew found himself encompassed by a sea of Dont's, the 
 violation of a single one of which constituted a heinous sin. Rather than 
 violate any one of these, it was taught : it was better to sacrifice one's 
 country, fortune, health, even life. We have a striking illustration of 
 this in Pompey's capture of the Temple on the Sabbath-day, of which I 
 spoke before. But for the refusal of the Jews, who had in every way the 
 advantage, to attack the Romans on the Sabbath-Day, Pompey, as Jose- 
 phus shows us, might never have been able to batter down the Temple 
 walls, nor massacre the 12,000 patriots, nor drag princes of Israel behind 
 his triumphal-car through the streets of Rome, nor inaugurate that awful 
 catastrophe that was to receive its fatal finishing touch by Titus, a century 
 later. Three times in the History f Israel this idolatrous regard for the 
 Sabbath was the occasion of Jerusalem being taken by the enemy, and 
 more frequently still was it the cause of frightful carnage, the enemy 
 taken advantage of their refusal to defend themselves on the Sabbath- 
 Day. Thus was the Sabbath, that was instituted for the good of man, 
 turned into a supposed benefit to God, so narrowed had the God-con- 
 ception in Israel, and to such an elevation had the Sabbath idol been 
 raised. 
 
 And what is the Sabbath, the Saturday-Sabbath, to the great mass of 
 our people to-day but an idol. Its original intention is wholly lost sight
 
 of. On Saturday they work as hard as on any other 
 
 i j -r ,. i. j 1-^1 -r L The Sabbath-idol, 
 
 working-day, if not harder, and recreate as little, if not of the present 
 
 less. If they rest or recreate on any day in the week, or, y- 
 in other words, if they at all observe a Sabbath, (which word is the Hebrew 
 for the English word Rest) it is on Sunday, on the day following the six 
 working-days, and yet, by a strange contrariness of mind, their hardest 
 w r orking-day in the week they call their Sabbath, and the day, on which 
 they faithfully comply with the very letter of the Biblical command, that 
 calls for a day of rest after six of toil, the day on which they rest and 
 recreate, they unblushingly name the first working-day of the week. To- 
 such hypocrisy and farce men of reason lend themselves. God be thanked, 
 that their actions at least are more honest than their professions, that the 
 hygienic ends, for which the Sabbath was instituted, are satisfied, that 
 they do make the Sunday their Sabbath-Day, their Day of Rest and 
 Recreation, even though they say they don't. It is true, they do not 
 worship on Sunday, but for the most part neither on Saturday, nor on any 
 other day of the week. By not worshipping, they do in no way trans- 
 gress against the Fourth Commandment, which only asks for cessation 
 from work, for rest, but has not a word to say concerning worship, the 
 author of the Sabbath ordinance considering only the good of man, and 
 not the benefit of God, knowing that God will continue to exist without 
 His weekly meed of praise, but not man without his weekly Day of Rest. 
 
 One would hardly think it possible, that men, who observe every 
 detail of the Sabbath command, on Sunday, and violate it in every detail, 
 on Saturday, would dare to talk of adhering to principle, solely for refus- 
 ing to sanctify their Sunday-rest by spending an hour or two with their 
 God in their synagogue ; and yet such baseless boasts we are made to 
 hear almost daily. We have yet to find a single prohibition against 
 worshipping on Sunday in our Bible or in any of the Jewish Codices. 
 But well-nigh endless are the prohibitions against work on Saturday, and 
 yet these Sabbath-breakers proudly talk of principle, for publicly doing 
 what their Bible tells them not to do, and for not doing what has never 
 been prohibited. What else can this mean, but that such men as these 
 look upon the Sabbath as a sort of idol, that can be satisfied with a mass 
 of hypocritical pretensions? Surely no rational Israelite, with an omnis- 
 cient and omnipresent and just Jehovah for a God, would dare to attempt 
 to dupe Him with such a hollow mockery. 
 
 Only a hollow mockery it is, this pompous talk of principle, that 
 flows so glibly from the tongues of Sabbath-breakers. Those ancient 
 Israelites, who sacrificed their all, even their lives, rather than break the 
 Saturday-Sabbath, they might have talked of principle, and with truth. 
 If their course was not commendable, it was at least honorably consist- 
 ent. We certainly second the warning the father of the Macabees gave 
 to the fugitives of Modin, after many of them had been slaughtered on 
 account of not defending themselves on the Sabbath-Day, that by observ- 
 ing their law so rigorously they would prove their own enemies, and-
 
 benefit their foe through their own inactivity.* Yet we cannot help 
 admiring the self-sacrifice of the slaughtered for what they believed to be 
 principle. In our present intense struggle for existence I prefer to see a 
 man observing the Sunday-Sabbath to seeing him prove his own enemy 
 by resting two days in the week, which an observance of the Saturday- 
 Sabbath in our State would mean, thereby affording his competitor the 
 opportunity of crowding him to the wall. Yet, I cannot but admire the 
 man, who heroically sacrifices his own interests for the maintenance of 
 Ins principle. But I have nothing but pity for those, who garner in the 
 dollars on Saturday in the sweat of their brow, and keep their Sabbath- 
 rest on Sunday, and then talk of adhering to principle by attending the 
 Saturday-Service once or twice a year if that often for an hour or two, 
 (which loss is often made up by commencing the Saturday work an hour 
 or two earlier, or continuing it so much longer) or by sending their wives 
 or children, or by paying the synagogue-officials, to keep it for theui, or 
 by making a shrewd settlement with their Saturday -idol, giving him one- 
 third on Friday evening, and keeping the most profitable two-thirds of 
 the Saturday for themselves, for the pursuit of their respective vocations.. 
 I have nothing but pity for those, who spend the Sunday morning with 
 figuring over the profits of their Sabbath-breaking, or with breaking it 
 for mercenary ends as mercilessly as they broke their Saturday-Sabbath, 
 or with snoring in their beds, or with gambling at their clubs, who seldom 
 if ever attend a Saturday-service, and yet denounce our Sunday-Services 
 as The Sabbath of Convenience, when we are those, who put the people 
 to the inconvenience of spending a portion of the Sunday mornings at the 
 services, and of contributing towards their support, and of exerting their 
 utmost to restore the lost, and to awaken a religious feeling and interest 
 among those, whom the hypocritical and farcical Saturday-idolatry had 
 almost driven from the ranks of Israel. 
 
 There are yet other idolatries infesting the Jehovah worship of Israel. 
 There is the Kippur-Dayf idol. What a rallying on that day of the 
 scattered forces ! What a hurrying to the synagogues 
 The Kigpur-Day of p eop i e) who ne ver see the inside of them all the year 
 round ! What a fervor or what farce in praying and. 
 fasting, by people, who perhaps only ceased their sinning with their 
 entrance and will resume it upon their exit, and follow it for another 
 year ! What supplications by the pious to Jehovah, who (in painful con- 
 tradiction of the Jewish conception of Him as an incorporeal and incom- 
 prehensible spirit) is believed to hold with His ministering angels awful 
 court in heaven on that day, and to pronounce and seal the coming year's 
 destiny for each mortal. 
 
 There is the Kaddish\ idol. Well may the most stately edifice, the 
 
 most inspiring choir, the most eloquent preacher, envy his attractive 
 
 Th K dd h -A P wers > f r a ^ these combined will often fail to bring 
 
 people into the House of Worship, while the Kaddish-idol 
 
 succeeds in bringing them there, without any difficulty, and in keeping. 
 
 Josephus, Antiqu. XII, Chap, vi, 2. t Atonement-Day. tMournr's Prayer.
 
 them there till the year of mourning is over, to the day, and not a day 
 longer, and in keeping them away, till another death ushers them in for 
 another year. I have read of a physician, who daily offered up a prayer 
 to God to prosper his profession, by visiting many people with sickness. 
 Who would not forgive some of those unfortunate preachers, who are not 
 blessed with large Saturday-attendance, if now and then, they would 
 secretly offer up a prayer, that God might keep them supplied at least 
 with a Kaddisb-Minyan,* to enable them to conduct services at all? 
 Without the Kaddish-Idol, I know not, what in some congregations, would 
 become of the Jehovah-worship. 
 
 There is the Hebrew-language-Idol. The God, of whom, on the one 
 side, omniscience is postulated as one of his chief attributes, and for 
 whom knowledge of all languages, and of all hearts, be- 
 fore yet tongue utters articulate speech, is claimed, is, guag?ido? W lan ~ 
 on the other side believed to listen to prayers only when 
 offered in the Hebrew tongue. And, therefore, are poor children . tor- 
 tured into learning a dead language, which they no sooner learn than 
 they forget it. And therefore, are whole pages of Hebrew prayers of- 
 fered and read, of whose meaning the reader or listener is as innocent as 
 the new-born babe. 
 
 And there are yet other idolatries in connection with the Jehovah 
 worship, such as the insistence upon the Oriental fashion of worshipping 
 with covered head, with praying- scarf, and phylacteries, And other idols 
 the prohibition of instrumental music and of farnily- 
 pews in the House of Worship, the Bar Mitzvah, that turns a lad of 
 thirteen into a full-fledged member of the Congregation of Israel upon 
 reciting a Hebrew Benediction over the Scroll, the Matzotk\ diet on the 
 Passover; Shofar% alarm on the New Year; the Hfezzttzol/i-amulets, the 
 Tashlich Sin-transference, and a host of others, of which I have not the 
 time to-day to speak. 
 
 We have no reason to feel ashamed that a Roman General, two 
 thousand years ago, found our Hoty of Holies empty. We have much 
 reason to be proud that that emptiness has illumined and Be f ore trying- to 
 filled the earth, that the Jehovah-idea of our fathers has remove others' 
 conquered half the world, and is fast-conquering the sins, we must re- 
 other half. But we cannot yet rest on our laurels, and move our own - 
 flatter ourselves that Israel's monotheism is driving idolatry from off the 
 face of the earth. Pure monotheism is yet a rarity. We find it blazon- 
 ing on a million banners, but when we look close, we rarely find it free 
 from idolatrous adulterations. We hear loud professions of belief in an 
 invisible and incorporeal and inconceivable God, and alongside it: a 
 Trinity, a Holy Family, a Mediator, a God assuming human form, and 
 walking the earth and ascending again, bowing before images, drinking 
 and eating the blood and body of God, exorcising evil spirits with holy 
 water, and many others. Much work remains still to be done in clean- 
 ing pure monotheism from its idolatrous accretions. But the hand that 
 would clean others must be clean itself. Before looking at others' sin, 
 \ve must look at our own. Before trying to remove the idolatries of 
 others, we must first remove our own idolatrous Jehovah-pollutions. 
 Even unto us, as unto Israel in the wilderness, apply the words of Moses: 
 Thou shall have no other gods, beside Jehovah! 
 
 Quorum of ten adults necessary for communal prayer. -(-Unleavened Passover-bread. 
 
 fRam's horn.
 
 The Law of Retribution. 
 
 RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 Philadelphia, February 28th, 1892. 
 
 (Exod. xx, 5. 6) D'i) 1 1 ? ion rwy cm-'iy rax pj; 
 
 (Exod. xxxiv, 6. 7) npr X 1 ? HpJI ---- 1DH 311 
 
 (Ecci. iii, 8) xjt? 1 ? r\xi nnx 1 ? ny 
 
 Sweet is the low murmur of the sportive rivulet; sweet the soft lullaby 
 of the flower-rocking zephyr ; sweet the dreamy quiet of some secluded 
 forest retreat. Grand is the noisy sweep of the swollen 
 stream ; grand are the mighty ocean's rapturous embraces naUire^'nstorm 
 of the rock} r shore; grand the rushing of the wind o'er 
 field and through forest. But grandest, most majestic, most awe-inspi- 
 ring of all, is nature in her wrath and fury, rushing with the hurricane 
 through the forest, splintering and laying low the mighty time-defying 
 giants as if they were so many reeds, tearing through the populous cities, 
 scattering ruin and devastation all along her path ; or when with deafen- 
 ing thunder she roars through the ill-presaging, fast-flying clouds, or leaps, 
 astride the forked and blinding lightning, from rattling crag to crag ; 
 when she stirs up the vast ocean to its lowest depth, and hurls its frenzied 
 waves and billows against the strongest crafts of man, and tosses them 
 about as if they were so many straws, and sends terror and dismay into 
 the bravest hearts aboard or on shore. 
 
 Sweet is the winsome prattle of the little two- or three-year old ; 
 sweet the little nothings breathed by lover into the ears of his beloved ; 
 
 sweet the placid face of some saint at prayer ; sweet the 
 
 ,. ... _. . __, . : , . , ., r ^ Grandeurof man 
 
 angelic voice of some Sister of Mercy at the bedside of the in righteous 
 
 sick. Grand is the eloquence of the inspired orator ; grand llldl natlon 
 are the weighty words that drop from the lips of the hoary -headed master; 
 grand the human face animated with sympathy and compassion ; grand 
 the fire of enthusiasm flashing from the eye of patriot. But grandest of 
 all is the sight of man burning with righteous indignation, from whose 
 eyes dart the shafts of withering scorn, and annihilating contempt, whose 
 voice thunders forth scathing denunciations of the wrong done; whose 
 bosom heaves under the violence of his outraged feelings, whose hand is 
 raised to clutch the evil-doer and dash him to destruction, whose foot 
 stamps the floor as if to crush the viper under his heel. 
 
 Grand is that Biblical God-conception, that fancies Him spanning the 
 heavens with the rainbow as his everlasting pledge that He will never
 
 again curse the earth or smite every living thing as He 
 wrath God had recently done with the flood ;* grander that other 
 
 conception, that fancies Him declaring in the hearing of 
 Moses, that He is merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in 
 goodness and truth, rewards the righteous unto the thousandth genera- 
 tion, roots out sin, yet never lets the sinner go unpunished ;t but the 
 grandest, the most awe-inspiring, the boldest of all, is that God-concep- 
 tion, that represents Him on Sinai's top burning with righteous indigna- 
 tion over Israel's speedy turning from Him to the worship of the golden 
 calf, declaring that He will consume them, at once, in the fire of His 
 wrath, and thus have done with them forever. | 
 
 Grand is that sketch of the character of Moses, that represents him 
 pleading with God for sinful Israel, assuaging His wrath, inducing Him 
 
 to repent of the evil He intended to bring upon Israel ; 
 Grandeur of , ., , . 
 
 Moses in his just grander those other sketches, thatdescnbe his courageous 
 
 facing and pacifying the frequent uprisings and seditions 
 of the rebellious people ; but the grandest sketch of all is that, which tells 
 of his exceeding wrath at the sight of Israel dancing about the golden 
 calf, of his hurling the two tablets of stone, on which the Ten Command- 
 ments were graven, to the foot of the mountain, dashing them to pieces, 
 of his grinding the molten calf to powder, of his calling the faithful to 
 his side and bidding them to aid him in exterminating the base and un- 
 grateful idolators. 
 
 The gentle, the soft, the peaceful, whether in scenery or in character, 
 is ever sweet, ever comforting, ever welcome. Yet there is a grandeur 
 
 in storm, in agitation, in passionate outburst of righteous 
 ftorm C ar^n a eeded indignation, in inflicting just and merited punishment, 
 
 that is never reached by any other phase of nature, or by 
 any other trait of man. Both are needed in the economy of existence. 
 Both have their time and place. The one must relieve the other as the 
 night relieves the day, or as winter alternates with summer. The dead 
 calm breeds noxious poisons. Unbroken quiet breeds mutual stagnation 
 and moral disease. Peaceful submission, patient bearing of the yoke, 
 nurtures tyranny. Unrebuked, unpunished wrong-doing turns right- 
 doing from an obligation into an option. The belief that " letting well 
 enough alone ' ' is better than strife and agitation and exertion is the doom 
 of progress. The violent storm, the killing frost, the roaring thunder, 
 the flashing lightning, the drenching torrent, all these are indispensible 
 needs for purifying and invigorating earth and air. The loud voice of 
 just protest, the fearless denunciation of wrong, the merciless extirpation 
 of evil, the Moses's thundering defiance into the ears of the Pharaohs, 
 and storming through the rebellious camps, sword in hand, the Nathans 
 and the Knoxes flinging their "Thou art the man" "Thou art the 
 woman " in the face of voluptuous and murderous kings and queens, the 
 Luthers defying, in the face of death, corrupted heads of Church and 
 
 * G^n. -viii. 9. f Exod. xxxiv, 6. 7. \ Exod. xxxii.
 
 realm, the Patrick Henrys terrifying base henchmen of tyranny, and 
 inflaming the hearts of brave patriots, with their fiery eloquence, the 
 William Lloyd Garrisons preferring to be dragged through the streets 
 with halters around their necks, to bridling their tongues in their unspar- 
 ing castigations of the enemies of freedom, all these are men and means 
 that are ever needed to keep the fabric of society sound and safe, free and 
 progressive, without whose timely agitations and storms, unsparing sever- 
 ities and fearless dispensation of just and deserved punishment, the gen- 
 tle and the sweet and the peaceful in society would soon become an utter 
 impossibility. 
 
 Indignation over conscious and heartless wrong done, is an instinct 
 of human nature. To see crime meet with its deserved punishment is as 
 
 strong a yearning of our souls as to see virtue rewarded. 
 
 Hatred of wrong 
 Not to hate the oppressor, not to loathe the vicious, not an instinct of our 
 
 to desire to see the unrepentent cruel punished, is even B 
 more revolting to the rational mind than not loving the pure and the 
 innocent, the true and the good. He that cannot hate the wrong, can- 
 not truly love the right. If too weak to hate, he is not strong enough to 
 love. Great lovers of mankind are great haters of the enemies of man. 
 Great patriots are great haters of tyrants. The great lovers of justice and 
 truth have ever been the great haters of injustice and falsehood. To love 
 everything, good and ,bad, to forgive everything, to be indifferent to the 
 sway of wrong, or to attempt to wipe it out by means of prayer-meeting 
 whines, or emotional sentirnentalism, is not a virtue, if not a mental 
 aberration, it is a social crime. 
 
 Rational man is so constituted that, whether he will or not, he must 
 love the right and hate the wrong. It was Goethe who preached that 
 
 " Man's nature, in its narrow scope, demands 
 The twofold sentiment of love and hate." 
 
 (Torquato Tasso, Act IV, Sc. ii.) 
 
 One may deliver honey-tongued sermons, or write sweet-scented essays, 
 on the beauties of loving all and forgiving everything. But to do this, 
 
 one must lock himself within his study or church, and 
 
 So, too, the desire 
 walk the streets blindfolded, and close his ears against to see it justly 
 
 hearing the soul-harrowing stories of injustice and cruelty, put 
 and never permit book and newspaper to come into his hand, and never 
 set his foot in the districts of the vicious and criminal, in the criminal 
 court or in the morgue. To do this, one must never read of Russian 
 Siberian outrages and Jewish persecutions, never hear religious peoples' 
 angelic professions in their churches, and devilish practices outside of 
 them, never see a son's heartless treatment of his aged and helpless 
 mother, or a brutal husband strike weak and defenseless wife and chil- 
 dren, never see a millionaire landlord turning in mid-winter a poverty- 
 ridden family into the streets, never hear of innocence betrayed or assault- 
 ed. To do this, one must never feel the pang of seeing his own name and 
 purposes maligned, the honor of his own family besmirched,. of having 
 his own hard-earned savings torn from him, of seeing his own just rights
 
 trampled upon, of baring his own back to the tyrant's cruel lash. If then 
 he can love him who has but hate for him, if then he can forgive him who 
 effected his and his family's ruin and shame, if then he can kiss the hand 
 that smites him, if then he can say in the language of Shylock : 
 
 " Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last ; 
 You spurned me such a day ; another time 
 You call'd me dog ; and for these courtesies " 
 
 I'll offer you my love and my esteem, if this he do, he is not respon- 
 sible for his sayings and doings. The church may canonize him, but 
 rational people will most probably regard him as one whose mind has 
 been unbalanced by excess of suffering. 
 
 The authors of the Bible give us in each of the Testaments, and in 
 the most illustrious personages of each, striking confirmations of the 
 
 truth of the perhaps strange-sounding doctrines, which I 
 Moses h &ve j us t ennunciated, namely, that hatred of wrong is 
 
 as much of an instinct of human nature as is the love of 
 right, and that it is easier to write and talk of the virtue of loving all 
 characters and forgiving all offenses, than to practice it when brought 
 face to face with them. The Old Testament tells of Moses that he was 
 very meek, more than any other man on the face of the earth,* and his 
 actions and words, in many instances, f prove that this was not unmerited 
 praise. But in the presence of insolence and cruelty and grievous wrong, 
 that meekness frequently changes into burning indignation. There is 
 little meekness in his murderous onslaught on the Egyptian taskmaster 
 for cruel treatment of one of his down-trodden brethren. J Fervent and 
 touching is his supplication on Sinai's height, that God may forgive the 
 idolatry of his way ward people, and not exterminate them, and it is no 
 small compliment to him that his eloquence and logic and influence 
 should have succeeded in annulling the fatal decree. But what differ- 
 ence between the Moses at the top, and the Moses at the bottom, of the 
 mountain ! When his own eyes beheld the people's ravings around their 
 molten idol, he thought no more of his eloquent entreaty for forgiveness, 
 nor of his logical argument, which had proved so powerful with God. 
 His wrath waxed exceedingly hot, and with sword in hand, and with an 
 armed force at his side, he himself entered upon that very extermination, 
 which but a short time before he had prevented God from doing. On top, 
 he merely talked about what he saw not and felt not ; at the bottom, he 
 saw and felt the wrong, and seeing and feeling it meant hating it, and 
 an eager desire to punish its perpetrators to prevent its repetition. 
 
 We have a somewhat similar illustration in the New Testament of 
 the difference between theoretic love and forgiveness of the wrong-doer, 
 
 and the hatred of him when brought in real contact with 
 " d Jesus. nim - Nowhere perhaps is the lesson of loving the enemy, 
 
 of forgiving offense, of patiently submitting to outrage, 
 more forcibly inculcated than in the Gospels. The Christian is there rig- 
 idly enjoined to resist no evil, to turn also the right cheek to him who 
 
 * Numb, xii, 3. tCf. Numb. xi. xii. xiv. xvi. tExod, ii, 11-12,
 
 smites him on the left, lo surrender also the cloak to him who takes his 
 coat, to do good to him that harms him, and to suffer, without resent- 
 ment and punishment, a number of other insults and indignities and 
 wrongs. But as beautiful as these lessons were to listen to and to read, 
 so impossible were they for real practice, and not only for those to whom 
 they were enjoined, but even to Jesus himself, who enjoined them. Those 
 bitter invectives, which he, according to the Gospel stories, hurled at the 
 heads of the Scribes and Pharisees, betoken little love of the enemy, less 
 of blessing those that cursed him, and least of non-resistance of evil. 
 One is at a loss to find even a trace of love and forgiveness in such abus- 
 ive epithets as "you hypocrites," "you whited sepulchres," " you fools 
 and blind," " you serpents, you generation of vipers."* His rushing into 
 the Temple-court, scourge in hand, driving out those that offered there 
 sacrificial animals for sale, over-turning the tables of those that exchanged 
 the money of foreign Jews, who came to bring their offerings, and denoun- 
 cing them as thieves, f may witness to his pious zeal, and to his wrathful 
 indignation over what to him seemed a wrong, but it is poor practice of 
 his own doctrine of loving the enemy, of resisting no evil, of doing good 
 to those that do wrong, and the like. And if impossible for the lawgiver 
 himself to practice his own laws, we can not be surprised at the non- 
 observance of these precepts by almost the whole Christian world, from 
 the time they were first given to this day. Their fearful contentions, 
 their bloody wars, frightful massacres, terrible persecutions, their racks 
 and blocks and stakes and gibbets, their crowded penitentiaries, their 
 clerical hatreds, their social ostracisms and restrictions, all these tell but 
 too plainly the truth that man cannot love all his enemies, nor forgive 
 all offenses, nor submit to all insults and outrages, nor to let all wrong- 
 doers go unpunished. 
 
 And he cannot, because he shall not. It may seem brutal to the sen- 
 timental emotionalist, but without it we all would still have been brutes. 
 Moral evolution is not a hot-house plant, or a prayer- 
 meeting product. It will not thrive on rose-water or clpe^uJJishme'S 
 honeyed sentiments. It must wrestle with the elements. 
 .Its soil must be saturated with blood. Pain and despair must moan and 
 groan through its branches. It must endure the summer's scorching 
 shafts and the winter's biting frosts, before it can grow into a tree fit to 
 grace a Paradise. 
 
 Sin shall not escape the condemnation of the righteous nor the pun- 
 ishment of the just is a law graven on our hearts. It is our soul's inheri- 
 tance from God. It is its dower received from the hand 
 of Nature herself. For it is thus that God and nature "i^JffiuSSS? 
 deal with wrong, and thus have they ever dealt with it. 
 It is that law, which modern scholars have only now succeeded in grasp- 
 ing, and in turning into a science, but which the Old Testament writers 
 have formulated thousands of years ago, and have deemed important 
 venough to place among the very first of their Ten Commandments. It is 
 
 * St. Mat. xxiii, 13-33. |St. John ii ; St. Mark xi.
 
 that command, which, told in the language of modern science, says that 
 the Laws of Nature are eternal, immutable, inviolable. If heeded and 
 obeyed, they yield their blessed reward, even to remote generations, but 
 if transgressed, punishment is sure to follow, and transmit itself to future 
 descendants. Fire shall give ns warmth, shall aid our industries, shall 
 further our progress, shall benefit by its helpful service not only us but 
 also those that shall come after us. But if we heed not its laws, or trans- 
 gress against them, it will turn from an abject slave to an inexorable 
 tyrant, and smite us painfully, fatally, or lay our proudest possessions in 
 ashes, no matter whether home or school, church or hospital. Water, 
 like fire, has been given ns to be one of the supports of life. But if we 
 wantonly violate its laws, or fail to exercise the necessary care, it will 
 injure or destroy those whom before it aided and blessed, and neither 
 prayer nor bribe will stay its destruction till its wrath has spent itself. 
 Air is to serve us as the main stay of life. Every breath of it is to send 
 new currents of strength and energy and health into our system. But 
 if we wantonly expose ourselves to it when it is chill and damp, if we 
 neglect to preserve its purity, if we suffer it to become contaminated with 
 filth and pollution, it will change from benefactor to implacable enemy, 
 poison our system, no matter whether we be saint or sinner, torture us 
 with disease, and not infrequently transmit its poison and its torture even 
 to our children and children's children. 
 
 What is true of the Laws of Nature is equally true of the Laws of 
 Morality. They, too, are inviolable. No one can transgress against them 
 with impunity. No one can defy them without bringing 
 i>w of Heredity punishment upon himself worse still, without transmit- 
 ting that punishment to his children and children's chil- 
 dren. If he corrupts himself, the corruption will long cling to him and 
 his, and wreak its vengeance till eliminated. If he wantonly saps his 
 vitality, a weak and degenerated posterity will testify to the sin of its 
 ancestry. If he bring shame upon his name, three and four generations 
 will pass before it will be erased from the family's escutcheon or con- 
 science.* 
 
 The punishment may be slow in coming, but come it will. God, as 
 the Old Testament writer already observed, is patient and long-suffering, 
 
 but He never lets the sinner go unpunished, and the pun- 
 Punishment may . TT- 
 be slow in com- ishment often is all the severer for His longer patience, 
 ing but it comes The storm is never so violent and never so destructive 
 as when it conies after a long dead calm. The avenging hand that is 
 slowest to rise, often deals the quickest and most telling blows. So true 
 is this, that it has become a proverb of every literature-possessing people. 
 '"The mill of the gods grinds late, but it grinds to powder" spake the 
 ancient Greeks. " The feet of the avenging deities are shod with wool," 
 "God has His own time and His own way," wrote the ancient Romans. 
 "So long goes the pitcher to the well, till its handle breaks " is the fam- 
 iliar adage of the Germans. "God comes with leaden feet, but strikes 
 
 *For fuller treatment, see lecture : Heredity, Series III, No, 18.
 
 with iron hand " is a common English saying. And in like manner do 
 the other civilized peoples of the earth confirm the truth, that in the 
 divine dispensation of justice sentence delayed does not mean sin over- 
 looked, or pardoned. 
 
 " Though the mills of God grind slowly, 
 Yet they grind exceeding small ; 
 Though with patience He stands waiting, 
 With exactness grinds He all." 
 
 Friedr. von Logau, Transl. by Henry W. Longfellow: . 
 
 But, though a truth, universally recognized, and confirmed by centu- 
 ries of experience, long-deferred punishment has ever encouraged the 
 sinner in his evil, and perplexed the righteous. Already in Biblical times, . 
 Koheleth preached : " Because sentence against an evil work is not exe- 
 cuted speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them 
 to do evil."* And the question: "Why does the sinner prosper?" is. 
 already the despairing cry of Job. Job judged the sinner by outward 
 appearances, and pronounced him happy and spared, before yet he had 
 seen his or his children's last days. He could not peer into the sinner's 
 conscience, and see there the harrowing scenes and ghastly processions, 
 such as Hamlet has enacted before his father's murderer or such as haunt 
 the sleep or dreams of Richard III ; nor had he heard the words that 
 Solon spake to the wealthy and powerful Croesus : ' No man is to be 
 deemed happy till he has ended in a happy way,' to which we may add, 
 or until his children or children's children have ended in a happy way. 
 When Jacob returned from his uncle Laban blessed with wives and chil- 
 dren, and with a great abundance of earthly goods, it is likely that his 
 neighbors shook their heads and said : ' ' This man deceived his old and 
 blind father, and defrauded his brother, and for his punishment he has 
 wealth and power and influence and happiness. What good in being 
 righteous, when evil yields such rich rewards?" A score of years later, 
 when hearing of the loss of his favorite wife and son, of the contentions 
 and vices and strifes of his children,, of the miseries and sorrows of his 
 old age, they perhaps recognized that there is retribution, that punish- 
 ment may tarry long, yet come it will. "There is no God, there is no 
 Justice, else this fiend Robespierre would long since have been struck 
 down by his vengeance," moaned, perhaps, the terror-stricken people of 
 Paris during the Reign of Terror. But when they saw his head drop from 
 the guillotine, perhaps they bowed their heads and said : " There is retri- 
 butive justice even in this world." Those were true words which Anne 
 of Austria, Queen of France, said to Cardinal Richelieu, her implacable 
 enemy : "My Lord Cardinal, there is one fact which you seem to have 
 entirely forgotten. God is a sure paymaster. He may not pay at the 
 end of every week or month or year ; but I charge you, remember that 
 He pays in the end." 
 
 Our impatience over God's patience often prevents our seeing that 
 Retributive Justice moves slowly, imperceptibly, but not the less surely,. 
 
 *Eccl. viii. 2.
 
 like the small hand across the dial plate. We may not 
 
 G^^tience!" see i1: move > ^ ut when the hour for striking comes, it is 
 at the striking place. 
 
 " There is a time, and justice marks the date, 
 For long-forbearing clemency to wait ; 
 That hour elapsed, the incurable revolt 
 Is punished, and down comes the thunder-bolt." Cowper. 
 
 You step into your garden after the storm has spent its force, and are 
 amazed to find the strongest, proudest tree prostrate on the ground. It 
 had all along seemed to you the embodiment of strength. You examine 
 it, and you no longer wonder why. The bark has hid from view a rotten 
 interior. For years, the slow process of decay has been going on within,, 
 till corruption had eaten out its very core, and when the storm came, it 
 toppled over, as if it were some toy-tree from some child's Noah's ark_ 
 In this fallen tree you see the symbol of some of your apparently healthy 
 and happy and prosperous men of sin. For years, they have gone on 
 dissipating, corrupting, sinning, against the Laws of Nature and Morality.. 
 Outwardly they bear the signs of prosperity, of health, of happiness. But 
 the moral rottenness is eating deeper and deeper, till, when least expected, 
 you see them prostrate in incurable disease, in death, or in chains in 
 some penitentiary ; and the Cain's sign of disease and sin and shame 
 stamped deep upon their families. 
 
 To our poor understanding the suffering of innocent posterity for the 
 sins of ancestry often seems unjust, and a poor verification of the Biblical 
 
 claim, that God is merciful and gracious and abundant in 
 Posterity's brief . . 
 
 suffering for goodness, mentioned in connection with the awful decree.* 
 
 stry's sm. g u ^ ^ s verv (J ecr ee, awful as it seems, may perhaps con- 
 tain one of the strongest proofs of the goodness and mercy of God. In- 
 visiting punishment for transgression against inviolable natural and moral 
 laws, God has not His own but man's and society's good in view. If 
 these laws could be transgressed with impunity there never would be,, 
 nor could be, any civilization or morality. If man has transgressed, he- 
 must suffer, that he may not . transgress again ; and that others may be 
 deterred by the example of his sufferings ; and society shall suffer, that 
 it may see to it that such transgressions be not again committed. But 
 often while the wrong done inflicts its punishment within the flesh and 
 mind and conscience of the wrong-doer it escapes punishment without, 
 and the deterrent object of punishment is thereby lost. Therefore, in 
 visiting the sins of the parents upon their offspring, the deterrent purpose 
 of punishment is not only attained, but even in a more striking degree.. 
 Their innocent sufferings appeal all the stronger to the hearts of men,, 
 and act as a more powerful check on their evil inclinations For, how- 
 ever indifferent a man may be as to the painful consequences of his wrongs 
 on strangers, he is apt to be deeply touched at the thought that his own 
 progeny, his own flesh and blood, should innocently be made to suffer 
 physically or mentally or morally or socially, because of uncurbed indul- 
 
 Exod. xxxiv, 6. 7.
 
 gence of his passions or appettites or greeds. Who knows not of instances 
 of temptations resisted, of evil passions subdued, of bad habits conquered, 
 by parents, so as not to bring disgrace and suffering upon their innocent 
 children ? God may have his own way for compensating the sufferings of 
 the innocent, but that evil may the speedier be rooted out, that man may 
 be the better deterred from wrong-doing, that the greatest good of the 
 greatest number may the speedier be secured, heroic measures must be 
 resorted to. A few innocents must suffer to appall the many and to 
 keep them innocent. 
 
 Whether this be the reason why the sins of parents are visited upon 
 their progeny, or whether there be other reasons more plausible than this, 
 the fact remains that it is, and has been, a Law of Nature, 
 and in all probability will contiime so, whether we think reward for auces- 
 it just or not. If we think it unjust, we have an easy way try s virtue - 
 of preventing it from afflicting our descendants, by not furnishing it with 
 any sins of our own to be visited upon them. Let us guard our health, 
 purity, integrity, honor, and we will guard our children's at the same 
 time, and that of their children's children, too, even unto the thousandth 
 generation. We will then no longer question God's kindness and mercy, 
 seeing, that while God's punishment of parental sin seldom extends over 
 more than three or four generations of posterity, His reward of parental 
 virtue extends even unto the remotest descendants. 
 
 The room, in which some fragrant flower has bloomed, retains the 
 odor long after the plant has been removed. A room once flavored by 
 musk, retains its odor even after the lapse of many years. The western sky 
 reflects the glory of the sun, long after it sinks beneath the horizon. A 
 parent's pure life and good name and virtuous deeds transmit them- 
 selves to their children, and reap their reward and blessing long after 
 their author is no more. Let parents leave their children only wealth, 
 and a generation or two hence may see that wealth disgrace posterity and 
 ancestry, and fly away. Let them bequeath to their children health, 
 virtue, good deed, brain, and even centuries hence doors and hearts will 
 open wide to their children, either for their own sakes, or in memory of 
 their noble ancestry. A century ago Russia manifested kindly feelings 
 towards our country while in distress, and the steamer Indiana, that 
 hastened, laden with food, from our port on Monday last to relieve the 
 famine-stricken, demonstrated how the virtues of parents are remem- 
 bered even on their distant descendants. The worthy progeny of dis- 
 tinguished patriots, leaders, scholars, benefactors, find opportunities and 
 positions, for which men of obscure origin often struggle in vain. No 
 parental virtue is lost. Its every healthy drop, its every noble thought, 
 its every good word, its every pure example, is a seed cast in the field of 
 Time, which blooms and ripens blessed fruit through all Eternity.
 
 Reverence to whom Reverence belongs. 
 
 RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 Philadelphia, March 6th, 1892. 
 
 (Exod. xx. 7) xijy 1 ? yn^x rprr Dty r\N 
 
 (Exod. xxii. 28) -ixn X 1 ? 10; % 2 JTBUl ^pn K 1 ? 
 (Talmud, "Aboth" 19, a) o'Diy X11O3 pi *O1O '7T 
 
 " The service past, around the pious man, 
 With steady zeal, each honest rustic ran ; 
 E'en children follow'd with endearing wile, 
 And pluck'd his gown, to share the good man'ssmile." 
 
 Goldsmith's The Deserted Village. 
 
 Thus wrote Goldsmith, the poet. But, though a poet's writing, it 
 stands by no means for a poetic fancy. Such was the reverence shown 
 
 to village parsons in the time of Goldsmith, and such is 
 
 , . Treatment of 
 still shown them in the rural distncts of Europe, and in clergy in former 
 
 the entire Orient. In these quiet and conservative com- times an<1 abroad 
 munities the preacher is still regarded a holy man, singled out, by special 
 call from the power on High, to prepare human lives and souls for the 
 spiritual life that is to be. As God's vicegerents, almost divine virtues 
 are attributed to them, and godly honors are shown .to them. Their mere 
 presence awes, hushes the loud voice, checks the quick step. Their touch 
 of hand calms the disquieted soul. Their word of sympathy is healing 
 balm to the lacerated heart Their word of praise inspires the soul ; their 
 word of rebuke terrifies it. Their blessing proves a blessing, their curse 
 becomes a curse. 
 
 In the larger European cities, however, and all over our own country, 
 the reverence that once hedged the minister has almost wholly fled. 
 There and here, he is but rarely regarded as the God- 
 appointed and God-anointed. If he is a man of distinction, Its treatmc " h : ere 
 a scholar, an orator, a benefactor, he meets with the recog- 
 nition and the respect that are generally accorded to such merits. If his 
 abilities fall short of the public's reasonable expectations, and his actions 
 belie his professions, his sacred calling will not shield him from contempt. 
 Not infrequently, such contempt extends even to ministers of better des- 
 ert. His utterances are no longer accepted as oracles ; and so far are 
 people now-a-days from considering it irreverent to question or criticize 
 aught he says, that few public persons are more severely scrutinized or 
 more mercilessly dissected than the preachers. Old and young, learned
 
 and ignorant, pure and impure, deem it their prerogative to carp, and 
 sneer, and poke fun at the minister. Not a few regard him as a sort of 
 luxury, maintained at a considerable expense to entertain women and 
 children, and to frighten the simple and wicked with horrible ghost stories; 
 while quite a sprinkling vehemently clamor for his suppression to pre- 
 vent his perpetuating ancient superstitions or his continuing to clog the 
 wheel's of progress. 
 
 What may the reason be of this contrast between the treatment of 
 the ministry in former times and now ? It cannot be due to mental and 
 moral inferiority, for never before has the ministry been so thoroughly 
 educated, never before has it stood on so high a moral plane, never before 
 has it labored so intensely in all movements aiming at the amelioration 
 of suffering and at the elevation of the human family, as does the clergy 
 at the present day. 
 
 Not in a deteriorated ministry, therefore, must the true reason of this 
 
 contrast be sought, but, most likely, in that iconoclastic spirit, that has 
 
 taken possession of our age, and has extinguished the 
 
 Difference due to 5 -, f- j j t, 1- r r 
 
 iconoclastic spirit halo of reverence around objects and men and beliefs for- 
 merly regarded with feelings of awe. From the time that 
 science lifted the veil of mystery, turned its light full on creeds and dog- 
 mas, turned miracles into natural phenomena, and revelations into imagi- 
 nations, swept with its telescope-broom the cobwebs of superstition from 
 the skies, extinguished the hell-fires in the interior of the earth, and 
 chased the spirits of evil from their hiding-places, a change has come over 
 the spirits of men. Fear has turned into sport, conviction into doubt, 
 belief into unbelief. Everything is questioned, and whatever no longer 
 satisfies is discarded, often the good with the bad, the kernel with the 
 shell, the grain with the husk. Levity in some quarters has become 
 fashionable, and scoffing passes for wit. The venerable does not awe, 
 and the ancient does not impress. The knee has forgotten the bend of 
 homage, and the head the bow of reverence. Humble God-worship and 
 reverential hero-worship have turned into arrogant worship of self and of 
 pelf. 
 
 Of our own country, and of many of our own people has this been 
 especially true. "The American has little reverence" is the common, 
 and the not altogether unjust, complaint of foreigners. 
 ?e d ve re^'ce eriCan He is but of yesterday, and only that of yesterday has 
 real merit in his eyes. His country is full of novelties 
 but empty of antiquities. His speculative mind is prospective ; he has 
 not yet quietened down to the retrospective. He knows not that awe 
 that overcomes the Orientalist, when standing before some monument 
 or relic or handiwork of an ancestor of thousands of years ago. In his 
 eyes the ancient is the effete, and an historic ruin is a heap of rubbish 
 that ought to be removed. One is almost inclined to believe that Mark 
 Twain indulged in a little satire rather than in a bit of humor, when he 
 makes one of his companions, upon being shown a manuscript letter of 
 Christopher Columbus' own hand-writing, declare, that he had seen boys
 
 in America only fourteen years old that could write better than that, and 
 wondered why so much fuss should be made over such poor handwriting, 
 or when he introduces other similar opinions on works of the ancient 
 masters, or on mementos of ancient events. The vastness of his own 
 country, its fabulous productiveness, its NiSgara and Yellowstone and 
 Yosemite, its great oceans to its right and left, its vast lakes and .plains 
 and mountain systems between, have so sated his mind as almost to make 
 him incapable of wonderment. He is rarely awed by scenic grandeur, or 
 humbled into reverence by his unparalleled blessings. He is a practical, 
 matter-of-fact man, with little poetry or sentiment or veneration in his 
 soul. 
 
 As a citizen of a republic he has no royalty to enforce homage, and 
 no aristocracy to command respect. He is a hero-worshipper, but the 
 hero worshipped is himself. If a man of wealth, he looks upon himself, 
 and is looked upon by others, as the peer of the best in the land, no mat- 
 ter whether a quarter or half a century ago he trudged behind the plow, 
 or went from house to house as a vender of small wares, or toiled as a 
 common laborer in mine or mill or shop, or whether he be still lacking 
 the elements of a good education. Obscure as his origin is, he knows 
 that it is but the counterpart of that of most of the others of his wealthy 
 confreres, and he feels no humiliation. . On the contrary, he rather prides 
 himself, and well he may, with being a self-made man, with being 
 indebted for his fortune only to his own brain and brawn. But unfortu- 
 nately, that pride is frequently accompanied by that self-assurance, self- 
 importance, arrogance, that has no regard for the inferior, no respect for the 
 superior in brain and skill; no reverence for the self-sacrificing trainer 
 of the young, and educator and comforter and helper of the old and sor- 
 rowing and suffering, no feeling of gratitude towards Him from whom 
 all his blessings flo\* The creed of many of these newly rich reads some- 
 what like this: I am the God, who brought me out of poverty and obscu- 
 rity; there is no other God beside me. 
 
 This irreverence, if not already a tendency of our age, and a trait of 
 the American character, certainly receives enough of encouragement in 
 many of our households, notably in the relationship between parents and 
 their children, and in our public life in the relationship between the 
 people and their officers, between teacher and pupils, and in our religious 
 life in the relationship between the people and their God, soon to make 
 it so. 
 
 As a nursery for the development of reverence, there is none better 
 than the home. To the infant mind the parents stand as its God. Their 
 tender and patient care, their fond love and self-sacrifice, observed in rela- 
 impress themselves upon its yet unconscious mind as the parents > aud Ween 
 Love and Power Supreme. One needs but listen to dis- children, 
 cussions between little children on the relative greatness between parents 
 and God., to satisfy himself of the superior position parents hold in the 
 hearts and minds of children. I remember overhearing such a conversa- 
 tion between a little boy and girl, in which both settled it to their fullest
 
 satisfaction, that their Papa and Mamma were greater than God, the girl 
 basing her argument on the fact that they gave her her clothes and toys 
 and candies, and the boy significantly adding: "Yes, and Papa can 
 whip. ' ' 
 
 While the gradually maturing mind corrects such childish extrava- 
 ganzas, the feeling of reverence for their parents, which their helpless 
 and dependent infancy has implanted, remains, and remains to the end 
 of children's lives, if parents know the art of maintaining it, if they under- 
 stand how to keep that golden means between affection and reserve, that 
 attracts children's love and confidence, and repels that familiarity that 
 breeds levity. Such parents not only win for themselves the filial respect 
 due them, but also secure their children's reverence for whatever they 
 themselves revere. Such parents have no difficulty of infusing into their 
 children sentiments of reverence also for their elders and superiors and 
 benefactors, for their God, and for him who ministers in his stead. The 
 filial reverence that roots itself in parents' hearts grows in breadth and 
 height till its branches spread overall deseiving men and objects, and its 
 crown reaches to the topmost throne of God. Easy bows that child's head 
 in worship that sees its parent worship. Easy believes that child the 
 highest and best that sees its mother, whom it thinks the highest and 
 best, humble herself before one yet higher and better. The truth of this 
 is beautifully confirmed by an authority no less eminent than Thomas 
 Carlyle. 
 
 ' My mother," wrote he, " with a true woman's heart and fine though uncultivated 
 
 sense, was in the strictest acceptation religious The highest whom I know 
 
 on earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven : 
 such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of your being ; mys- 
 teriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps, and 
 Reverence, the divinest in man, springs forth undying from its mean envelopment of 
 fear."* 
 
 Among the ancients, judging from the literatures they have left us, 
 parents seem to have understood the art of reverence-training better than 
 we do to-day. Their authority over their children con- 
 nc7e e nts e tinned absolute throughout their life. Even the right of 
 capital punishment was theirs, and was visited upon the 
 son or daughter guilty of striking or cursing a parent. Men of power 
 and authority, men fearless and cruel, men that routed armies and crushed 
 giants under their heel, humbled themselves in the dust in the presence 
 of their patriarchal sires, cowered under their curse, and prized their 
 blessings higher than the highest on earth. Disrespect of parents, neglect 
 of them in their old age, was classed among them with the most heinous 
 sins, and the beautiful precepts they have left us on the treatment due to 
 parents by their children, and the stories that have come down to us illus- 
 trative of the reverence shown to parents, of the sacrifices made in their 
 behalf by their children, of the patience with which they endured even 
 their foibles and failings, of the reverence shown their memory even after 
 death, would indicate both the horror with which filial irreverence must 
 have been regarded, and the infrequency of the offense. 
 * Carlyle : "Sartor Resartus," Bk. II, chap. ii.
 
 To a very large extent, this is still true in the Orient, and in the con- 
 servative parts of Europe. There children have not yet unlearned the 
 reverence due to those that reared them and toiled and 
 suffered for them. There it is still regarded a disrespect, abroad^^^^ 
 to sit in a parent's seat, to contradict them, to argue with 
 or to differ from them, even to complain of an injustice. Neither have 
 parents unlearned there the art of winning for themselves and of main- 
 taining such reverence. With all the love they have for their children, 
 they will not yield an inch of their parental prerogative. Not for a 
 moment will they permit them to outgrow the habit of looking up to 
 them, even though their children have grown tall, and themselves have 
 become small. Though their childrens' hearts form new alliances, they 
 will never allow a son's wife or a daughter's husband to' crowd a parent 
 out, nor the happiness over their own parenthood to make them less 
 anxious for a parent's kiss or blessing than in the days gone by. 
 
 Among us, however, our new state of things has introduced new 
 features into this old and sacred relationship between parents and their 
 children. Reverence for parents is of all virtues the last 
 we would think of ascribing to Young America. Barring fnce 'amoiig''^ 
 noble exceptions, the self-assertiveness of Young America 
 displays itself from his earliest childhood. While still in the cradle he is 
 the tyrant ; while yet in the nursery he rules the household. His will is 
 absolute. His every whim is indulged. He looks upon his parents as 
 created for the sole purpose of gratifying his wants. Ere yet out of his 
 kilts he contracts father into "dad " or " pap," and mother into " mam," 
 answers back, contradicts, mimics, and has not infrequently the satisfac- 
 tion of hearing his impudence and irreverence applauded and told to 
 others as youthful precocity, as prophetic signs of future greatness. 
 Grown to riper years, his " dad " and " mam " change to " Boss," " Old 
 Man," "Old Woman," "The Guv'ner." 
 
 The son, if self-supporting, assumes under the parental roof the air 
 of a boarder, often even when contributing nothing towards his support. 
 He speaks of his home as the "hash house," and grumbles, and quarrels 
 and finds fault with the manager of the household, his own mother, as if 
 she were a hired servant. 'Ere yet out of his teens, he carries the latch- 
 key, and is free to go and do where and w r hat he pleases, and return at 
 all hours of the night, without the need of giving an account of himself 
 to the " old folks." 
 
 The daughter frequently leads the life of a princess. While her 
 mother slaves around the house, she is lost in the mazes of a novel, 
 or drums on the piano, or gads in the neighborhood, or pleasantly 
 whiles her time away at the matinee or on the promenade. To preserve 
 the softness and whiteness of her hand, and the fairness of her complex- 
 ion, and the proportions of her figure, she shuns work, thinks honorable 
 self-support degrading, has her mother dance attendance ugon her, while 
 her poor father is obliged to toil himself to death to support her idleness 
 .and to gratify her wants.
 
 Much as the children are at fault for this state of affairs, that prevails 
 in not a few of our households, the parents themselves are frequently not 
 
 free from blame. They do not command the reverence 
 fe^lt"of Barents. that is tbeir due > because they know not how to win it, or 
 
 how to keep it. Their relationship with their children is 
 often of that familiar kind that breeds disrespect When fathers and sons 
 gamble at the same table, make bets, engage in heated discussions on 
 religious and political differences ; when mothers vie with their daugh- 
 ters in vanities and gaieties, in personal display and extravagances, 
 when parents must bribe their children into obedience, or are too weak 
 to deny, or afraid to prohibit, their children anything, or must patiently 
 submit to being corrected by their children on points of grammar or eti- 
 quette, in the presence of strangers, in such homes one must not expect 
 to find children displaying feelings of reverence for their parents, nor 
 expect to see them treat with reverence and consideration and apprecia- 
 tion their elders and superiors elsewhere, when the reverential feeling was 
 never planted, or, if planted, was never permitted to develop within the 
 home. 
 
 Another cause for our lack of reverence may be traced to its banish- 
 ment from our Public Schools. The. sacred awe that once encircled the 
 
 school has vanished. Our people do not think with the 
 treatment" 1 !' ancient Talmudist that the teacher deserves to be honored 
 
 public-school more than the parent and as much as God,* nor do they 
 
 look up with amazement to the schoolmaster, as did the 
 villagers of Goldsmith's poem, wondering how "one small head could 
 carry all he knew." There are scarcely any schoolmasters any more. 
 We have schoolmisses now. Poor pay and poorer treatment, self-respect 
 and the need of providing for their families : have driven the men out of 
 the professions, and they keep the lady teachers only so long at their 
 difficult and thankless posts, till some worthy man comes along to redeem 
 them out of their house of bondage. For soldiers who have been disa- 
 bled in the war millions of dollars are expended annually in pensions, 
 and palatial homes are provided for them, where they may end their days 
 in peace and comfort. To our teachers, however, who daily fight harder 
 battles and receive more painful wounds than many a soldier did on battle- 
 field, who daily battle with rebellious children and conspiring parents, 
 battle against ignorance, battle for the suppression of vice and crime, for 
 the promotion of prosperity and peace and good will among men, and 
 who sacrifice in that service their best years, their health, to this blessed 
 standing army we pay salaries barely enongh to keep them respectably 
 while on duty, and, when enfeebled or disabled by long and faithful service, 
 we dismiss them to find for themselves the bread of charity. 
 
 The treatment college professors receive at our hands is but little 
 better. Few professions require such continued stud}' and such faithful 
 
 * Aboth 19 a ; Baba Metziah, 33 a.
 
 application, few are so trying on the mind and so wearing 
 on the system, and few, if any, are so poorly paid as that c ' p 
 of the college-professor. By virtue of their position they 
 are expected to live respectably, and to keep themselves and families 
 respectably, and to do this they are paid salaries that make it a constant 
 struggle for them to make ends meet. It was a generous gift, that which 
 Professor Loornis, who was exceptionally blessed with wealth, bequeathed 
 the other day to Yale University. But his generosity showed itself most 
 in the special condition he made as to the disposition of his fund of a 
 quarter of a million dollars. It is to be devoted to the study of astronomy , 
 but not by adding new buildings or instruments, but by paying better 
 salaries to its professors, and by defraying the costs of their researches and 
 publications. Even so old and so popular a University as Yale requires 
 charity-bequests to enable it to pay respectable salaries to the men that 
 give it its illustrious fame. Such is the honor America shows to its men 
 of learning. We have plenty work for our professors, but little money, 
 and less recognition, and yet less honor. Our honors we need for our rich 
 Nabobs. Our big salaries go to professional base-ball players with their 
 $5,000 salary for six months sport. Our attention and applause goes to- 
 popular theatrical stars with their $50,000 a year income. 
 
 Abroad, if the professors' salaries are not any better than here, they 
 are, in a measure, compensated by the high regard in which they are held 
 
 in their communities. Kings and princes entertain them 
 
 , Treatment of 
 at their palaces. The aristocracy of wealth feels itself college-Profes- 
 
 honored with the company of the aristocracy of the brain. sors abroad - 
 Our aristocracy seems rather anxious to keep the learned fraternity at a 
 considerable distance from them. Perhaps for good reasons. Learned 
 men have a sharp eye and a keen scent for detecting parvenue upstarts- 
 and pretentious stupidity. How different the treatment is that is accorded 
 to learned men abroad, even in what we are pleased to call Heathen lands,, 
 we may learn from the bit of news that has recently reached us from 
 Prof. C. Meriwether, late of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, now 
 Professor of English and History in Tokio University, Japan. "Upon 
 arriving," so reads the news, " he was received with great ceremony and 
 every mark of honor. A special palace was given him as his residence, 
 with more than fifty servants. A stable, containing some of the finest 
 horses in the kingdom, was placed at his disposal, and in every way he 
 was treated with royal splendor." At home the American Professor's lot 
 was most likely that hard-worked and ill-paid kind of the rest of his fra- 
 ternity, glad perhaps to be able to live in a respectable flat, and to keep 
 one servant, and to enjoy the luxury of a street-car ride. 
 
 Another cause for our want of reverence ma}* be found in our politi- 
 cal system. We are in possession of Freedom of Press and Speech, and 
 
 we are making liberal use of them. For political ends, 
 
 ' Observed in 
 we deem it our right, nay our duty, to foist our men and treatment of 
 
 platforms upon the public, at the expense of the opposi- pu 
 
 tion. To attain our ends, no character is too sacred, no prior service too-
 
 honorable, no private life too inviolable, no mud too foul, no methods 
 too contemptible. The purest motives we impugn, the best purposes we 
 malign, the most honorably-won laurels we drag in the gutters, the most- 
 hard-earned reputations we bury under heaps of detraction and calumny. 
 Not yet content, we press yet art (God save the mark !) into our service. 
 We send glaring cartoons broadcast, carricaturing, belittling, befouling, 
 men and objects others have been in the habit of looking up to with awe 
 and reverence. 
 
 What the, consequences are we know only to our sorrow. It seldom 
 effects bad men, for the frequent excessive abuses and exaggerated charges- 
 directed against them, enable them to pose as martyrs ; while good men, 
 men who might render their country and people noble and able service, 
 are frightened away, for fear of seeing their name and fame lampooned 
 and carricatured, and the honor of their families besmirched. A feeling 
 of distrust, suspicion, is engendered in the minds of the whole people. 
 No one knows whom to trust, whom to believe honest. Politics have 
 come to be looked upon as a thing unholy, and contact with politicians is 
 believed by many to be getting into bad company. Start in politics, and 
 one of two goals so many believe lies before you, either the State- 
 House or the State-Prison, either the White-House or the Black-Cell, and 
 the same means may lead to the one or the other. 
 
 Our youth, in the meantime, growing up in the midst of exciting 
 campaigns and hot political discussions, hearing and seeing men in high 
 office, or aspirants for the same, vilified and scandalized, join one side 01 
 the other, and, though wholly influenced by their surroundings, being^ 
 too young and too inexperienced for independent judgment, often excel 
 their elders in their contempt and scorn and ridicule with which they talk 
 of men and institutions they ought to revere. Not long ago I heard a 
 little knee-high to one of our greatest living statesmen declare, that that 
 statesman, that had grown gray in honorable service to his country, was 
 not fit to be his boot-black. And this piece of impudence I saw rewarded 
 with loud applause and laughter by his parents and their friends. Little 
 did those parents realize that their applause planted perhaps the seed of 
 irreverence in their child's mind, that will grow and spread, till some day 
 he will make of his own parents a boot-jack. A good parental booting 
 instead of laughter would have been a better reward for the impudence 
 of their little jack. Is it to be expected that, with a taste for detraction 
 early developed, with habits of sneering and ridiculing early formed, and 
 their abuse of their elders and superiors early applauded, they will enter 
 the home, the school, the church, with feelings of respect, and accord to 
 parents and teachers, to preachers and to God more reverential treat- 
 ment? 
 
 It is not to be expected, and while the proverb that "it is the unex- 
 pected that always happens " holds good in many of our homes, and 
 schools, in large numbers of others we do not find it, very often not even 
 in the church, where we reasonably might have expected to find it. As a 
 people we Americans are said to be great in everything, great in natural
 
 possessions, great in wealth, great in enterprise, great in brag. Every- 
 thing that others possess we are said to possess in the superlative degree; 
 even godlessness. 
 
 We are said to be the greatest scoffers on earth. While we may be 
 unwilling to acknowledge it abroad, here, at home, and among ourselves, 
 
 we might as well be honest enough and admit that there 
 
 . . . Our irreverence 
 
 is much truth in this charge. We have never given the shown in our 
 
 world a God, or a Religion, or Sacred Institutions, and so scoffin &- 
 -we have no scruples in needlessly tearing down the good, that which has 
 not outlived its time and usefulness, that which others have laboriously 
 built up during thousands of years, and in poking fun at what others 
 revere. We talk enthusiastically of science, because we have contributed 
 an honorable share towards it. Science we believe to be real, practical, 
 profitable ; Religion we hold as a mixture of ignorance and superstition, 
 of fraud and fanaticism, impractical and unprofitable, and, as scoffing is 
 much easier than investigating and thinking, we find great delight in 
 parodying and burlesquing and travesting what others hold sacred. 
 
 Profanity is another greatness, which we are said to possess in a 
 superlative degree. Whether this be true or not, a fact it is, we have 
 
 profanity enough in our land to supply the whole earth, 
 
 ,. F . . ' In our profanity, 
 
 with plenty to spare for a few of our neighboring planets. 
 
 Nowhere in the world, travellers assure us, is the ear offended by such 
 "blasphemous and vulgar profanities as here. Sir Edwin Arnold informs 
 us that the term ' ' fellow ' ' is the worst in the Japanese vocabulary of 
 swear-words. I have recently read of a gentleman, who was a passenger 
 on a vessel sailing from India, where he had lived for a number of years, 
 who, greatly offended by the blasphemous profanity of an American sailor, 
 turned to him, and, pointing to his boy, said : "This boy was born and 
 brought up in a heathen country and a land of idolatry ; but, in all his 
 life, he never heard a man blaspheme his Maker till now. ' ' I have trav- 
 elled through seven of the largest and most populous countries of Europe, 
 and in not one of them have I heard profanities so vile, so vulgar, and so 
 blasphemous as here. Nothing else satisfies us as profanity unless it is 
 coupled with the name of God or that of His Satanic Majesty, and noth- 
 ing less contents us than sending the man or object of our displeasure 
 to the eternal roasting-plap e. Not a few among us think themselves all 
 the manlier for the greater vulgarity and blasphemy of their oaths. From 
 lips that never offer prayer, or utter blessing, the name of God falls most 
 frequently and most revoltingly in curse. 
 
 And in yet another irreverence we are said to excel, and the saddest 
 of them all, and that is the levity with which we treat the judicial oath. 
 
 Comparing the solemn manner in which the judicial oath 
 
 ,..,,. - ,, r . . , , . In our mockery 
 
 is administered in many of the foreign countries, their of the judicial 
 
 fasting before repairing to their respective places of wor- oath- 
 ship to render the oath before their Holy of Holies, comparing this mode 
 with our manner of having officers of the court, who quite frequently are 
 notorious infidels and scoffers, asking the men to be sworn to raise their
 
 hands while they mechanically mumble some words, which they call the 
 oath, of which frequently the only intelligible part is the conclusion : 
 "So help me God! " " Fifty cents, please! " one is certainly under the 
 painful necessity of admitting that the charge of turning the judicial 
 oath into a farce and a burlesque, that is laid at our doors, is not un- 
 founded. And we may as well also admit, that in stripping the oath of 
 its reverence, we not only have opened wide the door to perjury, but also 
 have knocked from under Law itself its strongest pillar, and from under 
 justice and truth one of their mightiest protectors. 
 
 Can we wonder then, with such irreverence abounding among us, with 
 such levity and mockery of sacred things and objects, with such profanities 
 
 and blasphemies of God, that the reverence shown our min- 
 d istrv snould differ s materially from that in Goldsmith's 
 
 poem, or in foreign lands? "Where God is blasphemed, 
 the preacher or teacher is unhonored," wrote the Rabbis of old*, and 
 modern experience confirms their observation. "God will not let him 
 go unpunished who takes His name in vain," f declares the Third Com- 
 mandment, and daily observations assure us, that this is not an empty 
 threat. We see the punishment in the loss of that sanctity, that once 
 gave the sweetest charm to the home. We see it in the banishment of the 
 best teaching-force from our schools, and of the best governing-power 
 from our politics, and of the best character-builders from our pulpits. 
 And this punishment will continue, until with Goethe we shall realize 
 that Reverence is the one virtue, on which all our virtues depend, the one 
 attribute without which all others avail us nothing, the one virtue " that 
 makes man in every point a man."t This punishment will continue, 
 until we shall introduce Goeth's principles of reverence-building into our 
 systems of education, till we shall teach our younger children to look up 
 with respect and awe to their superiors ; and our youth to look down on 
 earth, and gratefully and modestly consider whence all their blessings 
 flow; and those in the prime of life to look about and treat with reverence 
 all to whom reverence belongs. 
 
 Talmud, Berachoth 19, 6. fExod. xx. 7. 
 J"Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre," Bk, II. Chap. i.
 
 Through Labor to Rest. 
 
 RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 Philadelphia, March ijth, 1892. 
 
 (Exod. xx, 9. 10) rat? '.jrutyn an -uyr\ 
 
 (Isaiah Iviii, 13, 14) HIIT ^ JJ>T\n TX Jj 
 
 (Ecci. iii. 3) nun 1 ? njn yna 1 ? nj; 
 
 "Ah, why 
 Should life all labor be? " 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
 One of the most interesting and one of the most startling, of the many 
 interesting and startling, chapters in Professor L,ombroso's work : " The 
 
 Man of Genius" recently published in "The Contempo- 
 
 Mental supenor- 
 rary Science Series, is the one that treats on The Intlu- ity of European 
 
 ence of Race and Heredity on Genius and Insanity." The J ew- 
 distinguished writer takes occasion in that chapter to point out, by means 
 of carefully selected statistic^, the surprising predominance of genius 
 among the Jews of Western Europe, and among Jews in general. In a 
 tabulated form, he sums up the comparative number of Europeans 
 (Aryans) and Jews (Semites) in 100,000 celebrities, and astonishes us in 
 giving to the Jews, though forming but a very small percentage of the 
 European population, in many branches almost an equal number of dis- 
 tinguished men, and in quite a few superior numbers. To reproduce his 
 own table, he cites of celebrated 
 
 
 Europeans. 
 
 Jews. 
 
 
 Europeans. 
 
 Jews. 
 
 Actors .... 
 
 21 
 
 34 
 
 Miscellaneous . 
 
 4 
 
 3 
 
 Agriculture . . . 
 
 2 
 
 
 
 Metaphysics . . 
 
 2 
 
 18 
 
 Antiquaries . . 
 
 23 
 
 26 
 
 Musicians . . . 
 
 ii 
 
 7' 
 
 Architects . . . 
 
 6 
 
 6 
 
 Natural Science . 
 
 22 
 
 25 
 
 Artists .... 
 
 40 
 
 34 
 
 Naval .... 
 
 12 
 
 
 
 Authors .... 
 
 3i6 
 
 223 
 
 Philologists . . 
 
 '3 
 
 123 
 
 
 
 1O 5 
 
 1'oets 
 
 
 36 
 
 Engineers . . . 
 
 '3 
 
 9 
 
 Political Economy 
 
 2O 
 
 26 
 
 Engravers . . . 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 Science .... 
 
 51 
 
 52 
 
 Lawyers .... 
 
 44 
 
 40 
 
 Sculptors . , . 
 
 IO 
 
 12 
 
 Medicals . . . 
 
 31 
 
 49 
 
 Sovereigns . . 
 
 21 
 
 
 
 Merchants . . . 
 
 12 
 
 43 
 
 Statesmen . . . 
 
 125 
 
 83 
 
 Military .... 
 
 56 
 
 6 
 
 Travellers . . . 
 
 25 
 
 12
 
 2 
 \ 
 
 This table furnishes much food for reflection. It tells in the briefest 
 language the longest story of the influence of heredity, of the indestruc- 
 tibility of the cultivated mind, of the mind-sharpening power of persecu- 
 tion, of the truth of Darwin's Law of the Struggle for Existence, and of 
 ' the Survival of the Fittest. It tells how much of the sunny orient still 
 lives and shines in its occidental exile, still displays itself in the Jew's 
 speculative and meditative proneness, in his poetic and imaginative and 
 oratorical flights, in his musical and histrionic instincts, commercial habits, 
 diplomatic skill. It tells of the deathlessness of certain peculiar race- 
 instincts, if not of the deathlessness of that peculiar people that ranks as 
 the most distinguished of the Semitic race. 
 
 This latter belief finds strong confirmation in other tables prepared 
 by other erudite scientists, which show greater immunity of Jews from 
 
 epidemics and certain fatal diseases, greater longevity> 
 Physical supen- 
 
 orityofuuropean and a smaller death rate of children, than among Non- 
 Jews. To quote so eminent an authority as Dr. Benjamin 
 Ward Richardson, of England, whose researches are confirmed and supple- 
 mented by those of M. M. Legoyt, Hoffmann Neufville and Mayer : 
 
 " Children from one to five years of age die in the proportion of loper cent, amongst 
 the Jewish, and 14 per cent, amongst the Christian population. . . . The average 
 duration of the life of the Jew being 48 years and 9 months, and of the Christian 36 years 
 and 1 1 months. In the total of all ages, half of the Jews born reach the age of 53 years 
 and one month, whilst half the Christians born attain the age of 36 years only. A 
 quarter of the Jewish population is found living beyond 71 years, but a quarter of the 
 Christian population is found Hying beyond 59 years and 10 months only. The Civil 
 States extracts of Prussia give to the Jews, a mortality of 1.61 per cent ; .to the whole 
 kingdom 2.62 per cent. To the Jews they give an annual increase of 1.73 per cent ; to 
 the Christians 1.36 per cent. The effectives of the Jews require a period of 41^ years to 
 double themselves ; those of the other races 51 years. . . . The Jews escape the 
 great epidemics more readily than the other races with whom they live. Thus the 
 mortality from Cholera amongst them is so small that the very fact of its occurrence has 
 "been disputed."* . 
 
 If a more scrupulous regard for wholesome diet and for temperance, 
 if greater parental conscientiousness and happier and more faithful dom- 
 estic life, if quieter modes of life, if all these causes be insufficient to 
 account for this difference between Jew and Non-Jew, one can hardly 
 help believing that a special Providence holds guard over Israel, and 
 preserves! it for special ends. 
 
 This jlatter sweet hope, however, is rudely dissipated, by yet another 
 surprise in the same chapter of Lombroso's book, which is far from being 
 
 as pleasant as the other. In very plain language we are 
 Excessive mental 
 
 suffering of there informed, that with all the prodigality of Jewish 
 
 European jew. intellect and ability, the Jewish mind is suffering from 
 over-straip and from other cause's, to an alarmingly greater degree than 
 that of arjy other people In the cold and pitiless language of science 
 we are thbre informed, that the Jewish people furnish in some European 
 countries; four and even six times as many afflicted with mental disease 
 as the refet of the population. He quotes Servi and Vergaf as giving 
 
 Richardson, Diseases of Modern Life, Chap. II. 
 
 fGli Israelite di Europa, 1872; Archivio, di Statistics, Rome, 1880.
 
 more than four times as many insane among the Italian Jews as among 
 the Italian Christians ; and Mayr, who, in 1871, gave the proportion, of 
 insane in Germany as follows : 
 
 Per 10,000 Christians. Per 10,000 Jews. \ . ; 
 
 Prussia .... 8.7 .... 14.1 
 
 Bavaria 9.8 . . . , . 25.2 
 
 All Germany ... 8.6 .... 16.1 
 
 To make his case surer yet, he quotes from an article : " The Comparative 
 Distribution of Jewish Ability"% by Joseph Jacobs, an able Jewish writer of 
 England, wherein he points out that " while Englishmen have 3,050 per 
 million afflicted with mental disease, Scotchmen have 3,400, and Jews 
 3,900." 
 
 These are startling statements, and, as they are advanced by cautious 
 and scholarly men, we may consider them reliable. Still, I have no 
 doubt, that some of you are at this moment as sceptic as to the truthful- 
 ness of these facts and figures, as I was when first confronted by them. 
 To hear it stated on one side by eminent scholars, that the Jews, though 
 but one-sixtieth part of the European population, have contributed 
 many of the most illustrious of the celebrities of Europe, far more, in 
 proportion to the smallness of their number, than their Non-Jewish neigh- 
 bors, that they enjoy greater longevity, and better immunity from epi- 
 demics and certain virulent diseases, that they are not addicted to mind- 
 consuming passions, nor to the vice of alcoholism, nor to the use of any of 
 the other health-sapping narcotics, and then to see it proved on the other 
 side, that in proportion to their number the Jews contribute from twice 
 to four times as many mental sufferers as the Non-Jews, is, I know from 
 personal experience, not a little perplexing. 
 
 .Much I pondered on the probable cause of this. I thought of the 
 frequent marriages among our people within too close proximity of blood- 
 relationship, of the impoverishment of blood and vitality through our 
 scrupulously guarded prohibition of intermarriage with other races and 
 people ; I thought of the cruel persecutions, and of the insulting and 
 degrading indignities, that were, and are, heaped upon our people, that 
 prey on the minds of the more tender and more sensitive, till they drive 
 them into madness ; I thought of the enervating indoor-life and- vocation, 
 of the overzeal in study, of the straining mental absorption in abstract 
 theological speculations and kabbalistic mysticisms, of the rigorous reli- 
 gious devotions and observances, of the superstitious beliefs and fears, of 
 the bigotries and fanaticisms, of many of our European brethren, and I 
 believed I discovered in all of these some of the causes of their mental 
 afflictions. 
 
 While trying to ferret out yet other causes, I suddenly recalled a 
 paragraph in the same chapter of Professor Lombroso's book, which said 
 that the Jews were not the only ones thus afflicted, that 
 the neurotic tendency dominated the American as well, fnd ijnde^rest^ 
 The mystery was solved. Knowing the cause of the 
 
 Jjournal of Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, 1886, pp. 351-379.
 
 American's nervous troubles, I was no longer in the dark as to the cause 
 of the excessive amount of mental suffering among Jews. Both are the 
 victims of that same malady, which in our unprofessional language, goes 
 by the name of Over-work and Under-rest. 
 
 Almost everywhere in Europe, the Jew shares the American's restless 
 toil and moil in the busy marts and shops, offices and studios, his insati- 
 able greed after wealth or fame or power, his pitiful self-immolation on 
 the altar of his inexorable idol, his straining every nerve and fibre to its 
 utmost tension in this ceaseless feverish excitement, in his hurry and 
 rush, wear and tear, till the whole system collapses, till the digestive 
 system strikes, and the respiratory organs rebel, and the heart's faithful 
 engines break down under the high pressure, till the nerve-strings snap, 
 and the music ceases, and the light of reason goes out. 
 
 Worse still, for reasons for which he is not altogether responsible, the 
 European Jew is preponderatingly an indoor brain-worker. In Mr. Lotn- 
 broso's table of European celebrities, for instance, we find 
 pursuits" him exceeding the number of Non-Jews among the actors, 
 
 merchants, philosophers, professors, poets, physicians, 
 musicians ; but we find a blank recorded against him among the distin- 
 guished agriculturists and seafarers ; -while his representation among dis- 
 tinguished travellers is given as but one-half, and among the distinguished 
 military men as but one-ninth, the number of Non-Jews. His represen- 
 tation in the less noted mechanical and outdoor pursuits, such as builders, 
 quarriers, miners, is by other statisticians given in still smaller number. 
 As said before, for much of this he is not responsible. For many centu- 
 ries, the persecuting spirit pf Europe barred the doors of such pursuits 
 against him, and forced him into those indoor brain-taxing pursuits in 
 which he now predominates. And though he is now free to pursue any 
 calling he pleases, acquired habits, the Laws of Heredity and Environ- 
 ment, a weaker physical constitution, (through long exclusion from hard, 
 outdoor toil) have largely made him a creature of circumstances, beyond 
 which but comparatively few have been able to rise. 
 
 Furthermore, the cruelties and restrictions that were heaped upon 
 him in the past, and which seriously blighted his general culture and 
 
 , worldly prosperity, existing no more, and the ostracisms 
 And to over-zeal. 
 
 and indignities to which he is still subjected, as a Jew, 
 
 despite his enjoyment of equal rights, have kindled within him a double 
 yearning, that of rooting out every lingering vestige of his degraded 
 Ghetto-life, and that of enforcing recognition and respect, through sup- 
 erior fortune or through superior brain. Being by racial instincts natur- 
 ally industrious and thrifty and capable, and impelled by this spirit of 
 ambition, he entered upon the one great purpose of his life with a zeal 
 that was as remarkable as its consequent achievement. What has taken 
 others whole centuries to achieve, the Jew has equalled, and in many 
 cases excelled, within but a generation or two. 
 
 In all this he much resembles the American. The latter, too, allowed 
 himself but a very short time in which to achieve a very large amount.
 
 Starting with neither name or fame, or fortune, and en- 
 
 ... .In this he resera- 
 
 joying the most favorable opportunities for their attain- ties the Ameri- 
 
 ment, possessing, in addition, a vast amount of ambition, cau ' , 
 and placing before himself the illustrious example of European achieve- 
 ment, that took whole centuries to build up, he entered upon his fame- 
 and fortune-building with a zest, that in rapidity somewhat resembled the 
 hurricanes and cyclones of his country. 
 
 He attained his end. In the short time he allowed himself, he has 
 already equalled the European in many of his accomplishments and 
 possessions, and in quite a number he has far outstripped him. But, 
 unfortunately, his success resembled the cyclone also in its destructive- 
 ness. He is prosperous but diseased. He is pursuing the mad race after 
 fame and fortune with the malady of the neurotic tendency upon him. 
 He is a man blessed by God, but cursed by himself, a curse so virulent, 
 that not even the bountiful blessings of God can neutralize its poison. 
 With worry and anxiety he takes up the day's toil. Amidst feverish 
 excitements, fortune-involving speculations, keen competitions, brain- 
 taxing and health-sapping occupations, he passes the day. With want of 
 appetite he sits down to his meals, and with dyspepsia he rises from the 
 table. With nervous head-aches he retires, and the night he passes with 
 insomnia, or with feverish dreams, in which the overstrained mind re- 
 enacts, in an incoherent way, the gains and the losses, the hopes and the 
 disappointments, the worries and vexations of the day. 
 
 So much then is clear, that in wonderful achievements in an amaz- 
 ingly short period of time the Jew and American resemble each other, and, 
 alas, also in their fatal consequences. Two of the most capable and most 
 energetic peoples on the earth, peoples that could prove themselves mighty 
 benefactors to human kind, are fast digging the grave for their own sep- 
 ulture, or, worse still, are already far started on the road that leads to 
 the Insane Asylum. 
 
 And of the two, the condition of the Jew is the worse. With all his 
 advantages over the American, such as belonging to an older and more 
 
 enduring race, enjoying greater immunity from a num- 
 
 -,? T, r rj 1 The American- 
 
 ber 01 diseases, being ireer from the vice of drunkenness, jew a yet greater 
 
 and yet other vices, the curse of Over-work and Under- meutal sutferer - 
 rest rests heavier upon him than upon the other. The American, at least, 
 has one day out of seven, on which he ceases to be a slave of toil or 
 Mammon, one day in the week, which he sanctifies to rest and holiness, 
 ona day that is wholly his and his God's and his family's, his weekly 
 Sunday, which cools his burning brain, and calms his excited nerves and 
 quivering muscles 
 
 " as a harper lays his open palm 
 Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations." 
 
 Longfellow, '''The Golden Legend." 
 
 But the Jew (I refer to the general rule in both cases) has not even that 
 one day. He has no Sabbath. He has given it to the Christian world,
 
 but has forgotten that chanty that laegins at liome ; lie 
 He has no Sab- * , 
 
 bath on which to has kept but little of it for himself. Toiling, as we 
 
 have seen, mostly indoors, and mostly in vocations that 
 tax the brain to its utmost, day after day, Saturdays' as much as Mon- 
 days', and Sundays' (if not in one way than in another no less taxing) as 
 much as Saturdays', on the plea, thatthe seventh day, the Jewish Sabbath, 
 he cannot observe in Christian lands on account of overwhelming Gentile 
 environment and clientage and patronage, and on the first day, the 
 Christian Sabbath, he need not, nay, must not rest, he neither hallows 
 with rest nor sanctifies with worship, the Jewish or the Christian Sabbath. 
 Is it a wonder then, that statisticians should report from two to four times 
 as many brain-sufferers among Jews than among Non-Jews? 
 
 Let us not forget that these statistics, sad as they are, have yet that 
 
 point in their- favor, that they refer to the Jews of Western Europe, where 
 
 , among the more orthodox, especially among the poorer 
 
 He is not favored 
 
 by European quiet classes, there is a form of the Saturday-Sabbath observ- 
 ance, where holidays are more frequent, and where quieter 
 environments and more conservative tendencies, exercise some check on 
 the self-destructive course of the hard-toiling Jew. Max O'Reil gave us 
 recently the following interesting illustration of the quiet and convenient 
 way Europeans have in conducting their business. 
 
 I remember once it was at St. Malo, in the summer I entered a hatter's shop at 
 one o'clock in the afternoon. A well-dressed, ladylike girl came out of the back parlor 
 and inquired what I wanted. " I want a straw hat, mademoiselle," I said. "Oh, that's 
 very awkward just now!" " Is it?" " Well, you see, "she said, " my brother is at dinner;" 
 and after a pause of a few seconds she added, " Would you mind calling again in an 
 hour's time ?" " Not at all," I replied ; " I shall be delighted to do so." I was not only 
 amused, but struck with admiration for the independence of that worthy hatter. After 
 a few years' residence in England a little scene of that description was a great treat. 
 An hour later I called again. The young girl made her second appearance. " My 
 brother waited for you quite ten minutes," she said to me. " He has gone to the caffi 
 with a friend now." " I am sorry for that," I said. " When can I see him ?" " If you 
 step across to the caf6 I am sure he will be happy to come back and attend to you." I 
 thanked the young lady, went to the cafe and introduced myself to the hatter, who was 
 enjoying a cup of coffee and having a game of dominoes with a friend. He asked me 
 to allow him to finish the game, which of course, I was only too glad to do, and we 
 returned to the shop together. 
 
 Such easy-going modes of plying their callings, that surround the Euro- 
 pean Jew, cannot but exercise a curbing influence on his impetuosity or 
 ambition or greed. Besides, distinguished physicians are agreed that 
 brain- and-physical work is less exhausting in Europe than here. To quote 
 our own distinguished specialist on nervous diseases, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, 
 
 " For some reason, mental work is more exhausting here than in Europe; while, as 
 a rule, such Americans as have worked abroad are well aware that in France and in 
 England intellectual labor is less trying than it is with us. A great physiologist, well 
 known among us, long ago expressed to me the same opinion ; and one of the greatest 
 living naturalists, who is honored alike on both continents, is positive that brain-work 
 is harder and more hurtful here than abroad, an opinion which is shared by Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes and other competent observers. Certain it is that our thinkers of the 
 classes named are apt to break down with what the doctor knows as cerebral exhaus- 
 tion, a condition in which the mental organs.become more or less completely incapaci-
 
 tated for labor, and that this state of things is very much less- common among the 
 savans of Europe. . . . Physical work is more or less exhausting in different e'.imates. 
 . . . I have carefully questioned a number of master-mechanics who employ both 
 foreigners and native Americans, and I am assured that the British workman finds 
 labor more trying here than at home."* . 
 
 When, despite quieter ways and healthier climate, mental sufferings 
 dominate the European Jew to an alarming degree, what may we not 
 expect to find here, where the Jew is not favored by tran- 
 quil environment and climate, and where he shares both Prove g^jgy^ 
 the push and ambition and greed of his European brother, 
 and the American's restless excitement and breathless haste after fame or 
 fortune ? We are fortunately in the possessions of some vital statistics of 
 American Jews, made under the auspices of the Eleventh Census Bureau 
 of 1890, a review of which was published in the North American Review, 
 of January 1891, by Dr. John S. Billings. These statistics are confined to- 
 the native-born and to those who have been in this country for several 
 years, and though they are far from being complete they contain enough 
 to more than confirm the story, good and bad, that is told by statisticians 
 of European Jews, as may be seen from the following brief extracts. 
 
 " Those Jews who have been in the United States for more than 5 years have a 
 decidedly lower death-rate and greater longevity than the people of the same class by 
 whom they are surrounded. ... It also seems probable that they possess a partial 
 immunity from and a special liability to certain forms of disease ; that with prolonged 
 residence in the United States their death-rate is increasing. ... In this country, 
 as in other countries, the Jews are less liable than others to tuberculosis, and especially 
 to pulmonary consumption. . . . The Jews appear to be more affected by diseases 
 of the nervous system, and especially by diseases of the spinal cord, and by diabetes, by 
 diseases of the heart and great vessels, by diseases of the digestive system .... 
 than their neighbors." 
 
 He quotes figures showing a decided increase of these troubles since 1880, 
 also that the death-rate is rapidly increasing, while the birth- and marriage- 
 rates are diminishing, also that the number of those suffering from acute 
 or chronic disease is not only increasing but is already in excess of that 
 found in the general population of the United States. He examines their 
 different vocations, and finds their representation unproportionately large 
 in the indoor brain-taxing pursuits, most prominently in trade, law and 
 medicine. 
 
 And when we reflect on the large number of our Jewish merchant- 
 and professional-friends suffering from nervous prostration, or staggering 
 under the weight of heart-troubles and dyspeptic ailments; 
 when we recall the large number of friends, whose systems Con Observation 
 have suddenly collapsed, who, without a word of warning, 
 have been suddenly snatched away from us in the prime of their lives ; 
 when we see the ranks of the middle-aged thinning, and young men 
 aging, long before their time, and when we reflect on the sad fact, that 
 the sight of a healthy- looking Jewish merchant or profession alist is fast 
 becoming a rarity, that over-work has bleached their cheeks, and worry 
 has deadened the lustre of their eye, and long-continued application has 
 
 *S. Weir Mitchell, "Wear and Tear" pp. 5&-6i-
 
 8 
 
 curved the spine, and over-zeal or over-speculation has made the mind 
 irritable, and rich food together with want of sufficient rest and whole- 
 some out-door recreation have played havoc with their digestive systems, 
 when on this we ponder, we have the strongest confirmation of the facts 
 gathered by the U. S. Eleventh Census Bureau, concerning the vital sta- 
 tistics of the American Jew. 
 
 Why this is so is not hard to guess. A double curse rests upon him. 
 He is both an American and a Jew. As an American he works harder 
 
 than any other man. As an American Jew he works 
 STsabbath erveS harder and longer than any other man on the face of the 
 
 earth. His Sabbath, with the possible exception of such 
 as assemble here for worship and instruction on Sundays, is only a sem- 
 blance of one. On Saturday, his professed "Day of Rest," he slaves. 
 Sunday forenoons he generally spends in his shop or office, to accommodate 
 a customer through the back-door, or to straighten out things after the 
 Saturday rush, or to post up the books that have gotten behind, or to 
 attend to mail-matters, or to get the material out for Monday's work, 
 that no time may be lost. Sunday afternoons large numbers of them 
 generally spend at the club, at the card-table, where hundreds of dollars 
 are often lost and won, where the excitement of the game, together with 
 the confinement in close and hot and smoky rooms, are even more taxing 
 on the brain and more wearing on the system than the week-day's slavery. 
 And this health-sapping time-killer they call pleasure. I often think,, 
 when I see our young men and their elders flocking on Sundays to the 
 card-table, of that Oriental traveller who, watching a game of cricket, and 
 hearing that many of those playing were rich men, asked: 'why they did 
 not pay some poor people to do it for them,' and wonder what he would 
 have said, had he entered one of those card-rooms, and seen what the 
 players called pleasure. With not a few the Sunday evening witnesses 
 a repetition at home of the afternoon's nerve-straining at the club. 
 
 For others again the Sunday brings straining and tiring work in the 
 shape of attending meetings. Unlike most of our Non-Jewish neigh- 
 bors, who, to keep their Sabbath holy, take enough of time from their 
 week-day toil to attend to their various meetings, those overwhelming 
 numbers of ours, who violate their Saturday, and spurn a Jewish Sunday- 
 Service.and compelled by law to abstain from their week-day labors on 
 Sundays, turn it into a general meeting-day. Their Conventions, the 
 Annual Meetings, their Board- and Committee- and Society-Meetings, 
 their School-examinations, are set for that day. Many a one is often 
 required to attend two or three or more of them on a Sunday, and when 
 night comes, it finds him even more exhausted than on any of the pre- 
 ceding six working-days. Thus is the Jew without a Sabbath, without 
 a Day of Rest, but with an abundance of toil that saps his health and 
 diseases his mind. And this is the reason why he furnishes in Europe 
 twice and three times as many mental sufferers as his Non-Jewish neigh- 
 bor, and then I have no donbt many more times here. 
 
 This is a truth, made clear by the inexorable figures of statistics, that
 
 of all people the Jew is the greatest sufferer from Over-work and Under- 
 rest. His constitution, that braved the storms of ages, is 
 breaking down. His brain, that has illumined half the 
 world, is darkening. His nerves, that endured the strain 
 of centuries, are snapping. His heart, that once secured him greater 
 longevity, and his digestive system, that once sent rich measures of 
 healthy blood through his system, are failing, under the heat and pressure 
 and break-neck speed of American slavery. Has he been preserved for 
 such an inglorious end ? Is he hastening, here and in Europe, to his own 
 destruction ? There is certainly no other alternative, unless he applies 
 the only remedy at hand. He can not cure himself, at once, of his over- 
 fondness for indoor and brain-draining vocations, nor lift himself out of 
 the life-sapping whirlpool into which keen competition has forced him. 
 But he can have his Sabbath, his weekly Day of Rest and Recreation and 
 Sanctification, the only real pleasure on earth that he can have for noth- 
 ing, and that can secure him greater good than all the others combined, 
 that will prove that 
 
 "Joy and Temperance and Repose 
 Slam the door on the dfl&or's nose." 
 
 Friedr. v. t,ogau, Transl. by Longfellow. 
 
 To be sure, under present overwhelming Gentile environment, he 
 cannot advantageously make Saturday his weekly day of Rest. But this 
 
 is no reason why he cannot rest and recreate and worship 
 
 Better a Sunday- 
 Oil Sunday. It has ceased to be a matter of Sentiment. Sabbath than no 
 
 It has become a matter of Life or Death. It is a flagrant Sabbath - 
 transgression against the Fourth Commandment to work seven days in 
 the week ; it is not the slightest violation to work six days and to rest on 
 the seventh, even if that seventh be Sunday. Only a cruel monster, not 
 a God, could punish a man for preferring to worship his God and to rest 
 from his labors on the first day of the week, to profaning both the Satur- 
 day and the Sunday, and every other day of the week, with slavish toil. 
 What matters it that Christianity borrowed its first day Sabbath from the 
 Solar-worship of Heathens. Our own Seventh day Sabbath was derived 
 'from equal Heathen sources.* What matters it, if Christians connect a 
 certain dogma with the Sunday ; our resting and recreating and worship- 
 ping on the same day, does by no means involve the acceptance of that 
 or any other dogma. Unitarians worship on Sunday, as do the Trinita- 
 rians, and the former are not the least disturbed by the different dogmas 
 of the latter. Ingersoll makes of Christmas as joyous a holiday as the 
 most pious Christian, without thereby subscribing to the myth connected 
 with it. Some of our own chief Holy Days are of. Heathen origin ; our 
 having made them subserve Jewish purposes, has j&H^tended to increase 
 their sanctity. Christianity has taken much from us ; it is no humilia- 
 tion to take something good from it. 
 
 * " See the Saturday and Sunday-Sabbath," Series I, Lect. XX.
 
 And in taking it, we do it not as a compliment, but to serve our own 
 highest ends. We save our lives. We preserve ourselves as a people. 
 
 Since we will not, or cannot, keep our own Oriental 
 or q Death >n fI ' ife Saturday-Sabbath, let us, for our lives' sake, keep at least 
 
 the Occidental Sunday-Sabbath. It has already, in one 
 sense, been made obligatory upon us by the law of the land. Our shops 
 are closed, our busy hives of industry are hushed. We suffer no financial 
 loss by keeping Sunday. Let us also suffer no less of vital powers. Let 
 us obey the scriptural injunction, and keep one day holy, holy not in the 
 old Rabbinical or Puritanic sense, that turned the Sabbath into a day of 
 yet greater hardships, but in the sense of that which the Prophet Isaiah 
 advocated, a day of "Joy and Temperance and Repose," a day that shall 
 rest overtaxed parts, and bring others into activity that have been sup- 
 pressed during the week, that shall recuperate lost strength, repair dam- 
 ages in the system, rake out the ashes and cinders, and start the fire ablaz- 
 ing vigorously for the healthful resumption of the week's work. Conse- 
 crate the forenoon to God, in worship; the afternoon to Nature, in health- 
 ful out-door recreation, the evening to the Family, in sweet and happy 
 reunion, and in joyful play and converse around the domestic hearth, and 
 you spend the ideal Day of Rest. Your Sabbath then will be a sweet 
 and refreshing oasis in the week's wilderness of toil. Its prayer and ser- 
 mon, its song and music, its smile and laughter, will send fresh roses 
 into bleached cheeks, and new fire into dimmed eyes, and new flashes of 
 intellect into exhausted brain, will smoothen out the wrinkles which the 
 week's worries have left behind, will straighten out the care-bent back, 
 and make man look up not as an automaton, not as a human machine, 
 but as the lord of creation, a child of God.
 
 Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs. 
 
 RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 Philadelphia, March 2oth, 1892. 
 
 (Exod. xx, 12) yo- jimx' j;^ 1 ? px J1X1 
 (Deut. xxiv, 16) 
 (Malach. iii, 24) 
 
 . . . ' Untaught in youth my heart to tame 
 My springs of life were poisoned." 
 
 Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 
 
 Of moral philosophers we have had many, and of sermonizers on the 
 virtues and vices we ,have had yet more, and voluminous is the literature 
 they have left behind them, but I doubt whether any one 
 of them has portrayed the lowest vices and the highest vir- moral philos- 
 tues as forceful as Shakespeare did in the five brief acts of P h y- 
 his "King Lear." Within the few pages of this tearful tragedy he con- 
 trasts all that is most vicious and all that is most beautiful in human 
 nature, lust, ambition, avarice, ingratitude, injustice, deception, hatred, 
 treachery, cruelty, with purity, sincerity, love, loyalty, forbearance, endur- 
 ance, forgiveness, unselfishness, courage in language and in action so 
 powerful, that were all the sermons and systems, all the rules and treatises, 
 on morality suddenly to become lost, and this play to remain, I verily 
 believe enough could be drawn from it to reconstruct all that had been 
 lost. 
 
 In the delineation of one trait especially, in children's treatment of an 
 aged parent, he reaches a climax perhaps unequaled in the whole world's 
 literature. What character more repulsive than that of 
 Goneril or Regan ; what character more attractive than fifiaHngratitude!" 
 that of Cordelia ! What deception greater than that 
 wherewith the two first-named daughters wheedle out of their aged father 
 his power and possessions, under the semblance of love and devotion; 
 and what ingratitude more heinous than that wherewith they drive a 
 weak, old sire into misery and despair, into madness and death ! What 
 parent's pang keener than that which groans out of his cry of anguish : 
 
 " Ingratitude ! thou marble-hearted fiend, 
 More hideous, when thou showest thee in a child, 
 Than the sea-monster !" 
 
 or out of the curse which he launches upon Goneril 1 s head, that her own 
 child may
 
 . . . " be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her ! 
 
 Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth 
 
 With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks ; 
 
 Turn all her mother's pains, and benefits, 
 
 To laughter and contempt ; that she may feel 
 
 How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
 
 To have a thankless child." King Lear, Act I, Sc. iv. 
 
 What filial affection sweeter than that wherewith noble Cordelia comforts 
 her much-suffering father, rescues from the brink of madness him whom 
 her sisters had grievously wronged, and who himself had grievously 
 wronged her ! 
 
 This tragedy is a general favorite of both audience and actor. Few 
 of Shakespeare's plays keep the auditor as interested and arouse his pas- 
 sions as this, and not one yields to the impersonator of 
 The sympathies . i tr- r 
 
 with the wronged the leading character as rich a reward as King Lear. 
 
 Unlike such rolls as Richard III, Yago, or Macbeth, whose 
 meanness of character detracts considerably from the audience's apprecia- 
 tion of the excellence of the acting, the impersonator of King Lear holds 
 the tearful sympathy of his audience to the last. It is the same with 
 Cordelia; while her sisters Goneril and Regan reap for their reward the 
 audience's silent contempt or loud hisses of disapproval. Othello' } s or 
 Macbeth' s butcheries, Cassius' conspiracy or Hamlet's uncle's crime, do 
 not outrage our feelings as much as these daughters' base ingratitude. 
 The holiness, the inviolability of, and the filial reverence due to, parent- 
 hood are so stamped into our very souls, that every fibre in us cries aloud: 
 "Foul Treason," "Inhuman Barbarity," "Unpardonable Sin," at the 
 sight of wrong done by child against a parent, and more especially when 
 such a parent is aged and helpless and in want. 
 
 Yet, without in the least condoning the offense of the two daughters 
 of King Lear, I can not share all the sympathies lavished upon the father, 
 
 nor all the vituperation heaped upon the daughters. To 
 Children's ingra- >>-. r<- _*. r 
 
 titude result of me Cordelia s nobility of heart is more of a surprise than 
 parental neglect. ner ^ WQ s j[ s t ers ' crue lties. These two were, we have reason 
 to believe, the natural product of a father's weakness and indulgence and 
 folly. The opening scene, in which he shows himself the dupe of the 
 flattering tongues of two of his daughters, and disinherits the other 
 because, being true in her filial affection, she scorns those wiles by which 
 her sisters secure their ends, shows but too plainly the kind of metal his 
 fatherhood was made of, and the kind of example he must have set his 
 children. 
 
 A child's character is not a spontaneous growth ; it is largely what 
 heredity and environment,"constitution and training, make it. As is the 
 mold that is prepared for it so is the form in which it crystallizes itself. 
 If the pattern is for a sinner, a sinner the product will be. Monstrous 
 characters like those of Goneril and Regan are not self-creations. The 
 world condemns their ingratitude, and sympathizes with their aged father. 
 Did it know the whole story, could it tell to what parental omission or 
 commission the children's unnatural hard-heartedness was due, it would
 
 perhaps censure less and pity more. The uncorrected evil of the parent 
 shows itself in an intensified form in the child. Where you see a Lear 
 expect a Goneril. Where you see a guilty Goneril look for the indulgent 
 Lear. 
 
 Of all crimes, such heartlessness as these daughters are guilty of are 
 exceedingly rare. Regard for parents is the virtue of every well-raised 
 child, more especially of a child of the gentler sex. When, therefore, you 
 see daughters pitilessly driving an aged parent into madness and death, 
 hold them not responsible for all their guilt. Their cruelty is probably 
 the bitter fruitage of a parent's sowing. Where you see the opposite, 
 where you see a most reverential treatment of parents, when you see a 
 child's noble self-sacrifice for an aged parent's pleasure and convenience, 
 a child holding no burden too great, no expense too heavy, to make a 
 parent's closing scene of life a bright and happy one, be assured that 
 such parents do but reap what they have sown. When you read of a 
 Washington hastening, immediately after his election to the presidency 
 of the United States, to his aged mother, to clasp her to his bosom, -and 
 to tell her how much of all his honors was the work of her own dear 
 hands ; or when you read of Garfield insisting upon his aged mother 
 standing by his side while taking the oath of office, and falling upon her 
 neck in the sight of the thousands of people assembled, as soon as he had 
 been invested with the power of the highest office in the land, be assured 
 that both these aged mothers merited such filial reverence, that their toil, 
 their self-sacrifice, their regarding the raising of their children as a sacred 
 task and a responsible duty, their inculcating in their children, from their 
 earliest infancy, principles of integrity, of usefulness, of piety, made it 
 possible for their sons to occupy the Presidential chair of the United 
 States. 
 
 With so much of parental neglect and ignorance and false training 
 abounding, it is surprising that the Gonerils and Regans are not more 
 numerous, and that the Cordelias are so frequent. To 
 
 ... ., . , -^ ,- 1 1 i -, ,1 L Parenthood fares 
 
 me it is the strongest evidence of the powerful hold that better than it 
 
 parenthood has upon the affections of its offspring, and often deserves - 
 of the safeguards which nature herself has placed around the most sacred 
 relationship on earth, to keep the home intact, and to prevent society 
 from going to pieces. The infant's absolute dependence for food and 
 shelter, for comfort and protection, on its parents, the parents' power to 
 grant or to deny these, to smile or to frown, to caress or to strike, engen- 
 ders early feelings of awe, of gratefulness, of obedience, of respect, that 
 endure long beyond the period when the chiles dependence ceases, even 
 long beyond the time when parents' weakness and imperfections become 
 evident. Parents' gradual decline into the helplessness of old age, their 
 inability to struggle for themselves when nearing the end of their days, 
 recalls to children the time of their own helplessness, and prompts them 
 to do whatever they can to make the closing scene of their parents' lives 
 as free from care as possible. The absolute power of parents at the one 
 end, and their helplessness and dependence at the other, are weapons
 
 which nature herself has placed into their hands to enforce their children's 
 obedience, respect, consideration, and with them they easily conquer the 
 hearts of their offspring, often even undeserved. It is for this reason that 
 the Cordelias are far more frequent than the Gonerils and the Regans, 
 and that weak and indulgent and neglectful Lears frequently fare as well 
 by theii children as did the noble mothers of Washington and Garfield. 
 
 It often seems to me that the Fifth Commandment of our Deca- 
 logue is superfluous, that nature engraved it on the human heart as an 
 
 eternal and universal law long before it was decreed by 
 Fifth Command- 
 ment true in an human legislator. We certainly find as beautiful illustra- 
 tions of filial love and honor before the Proclamation of 
 the Decalogue as after, and among Polytheists as well as among Monothe- 
 ists. Often it seems to me, that if the Fifth Commandment had had a 
 slight alteration in its text, that instead of reading: "Honor thy father and 
 thy mother, ' ' etc. it would have read : ' ' Honor thy son and thy daughter, 
 that thy days may be long" we would have suffered nothing by that 
 change, on the contrary, we would have been greatly benefited by it. 
 
 It is not the parents that suffer as much from a want of honor from 
 their children, as the children from a want of honor from their parents. 
 
 On the side of the parents there stands arrayed Nature, 
 Children suffer 
 more from Law, Religion, Public Opinion, Personal Power ; on the 
 
 side of the weak and dependent, of the helpless and speech- 
 less babe, there stands nothing. Absolutely at the mercy of those into 
 whose care and keeping it is placed, it may be diseased physically, neg- 
 lected morally, dwarfed intellectually, crippled spiritually, vice upon vice 
 may be stamped upon its soul, burden upon burden may be laid upon its 
 weak shoulders, wrong upon wrong may be heaped upon it, and there is 
 no power to stop Parental Absolutism, no power to protect Dependent 
 Childhood. Imprisoned in its cradle, locked within its four walls, too 
 weak of tongue to tell its pitiful story of suffering, too weak of hand to 
 break its fetters, too weak of mind to grasp the misery for which it is 
 fitted, the world without goes on in woful ignorance of what is going on 
 within, prating everywhere, in school, in church, in press, on platform, 
 its endless platitudes about the honor due to parents, without bestowing 
 a thought on the honor due to children. 
 
 Our age has much to say against the tyranny of might over right, 
 against the power of the strong to press down the weak, and to keep them 
 down, and to slave or starve or punish them into silence. 
 par e en y ts a " ny f But what tyranny greater than that of parents ! What 
 % tyranny older than theirs ! From the remotest antiquity 
 
 their superior might constituted within the family the highest right. 
 From time immemorial unto this, parents have thought themselves gen- 
 erous, deserving of the highest praise and life-long gratitude for the morsel 
 of food and for the pittance of care they bestowed on those helpless little 
 creatures for whose existence they, and they alone, were wholly respon- 
 sible. The relationship between parents and children has much resem- 
 bled, and in many quarters still resembles, that between despots and their
 
 subjects. Parents sacrificed their children to their gods to bribe their 
 favor or to assuage their wrath. They visited capital punishment upon 
 them for disobedience even when such disobedience was justified. They 
 strangled new-born babes, especially when of the female sex, or exposed 
 them to cold or hunger or to the tooth of ferocious beast, if they wished 
 to rid themselves of the trouble and expense of raising them. They sold 
 their children into slavery and rioted with the money realized. They 
 gave them into marriage to whomsoever pleased the parents best. And 
 yet other outrages they perpetrated upon their helpless children, and 
 there was no one to question the rightfulness of their proceedings much 
 less to stop their tyranny. 
 
 In the great conflict of right against might, in the general uprising of 
 the oppressed weak against the tyrannical strong, that is being waged in 
 modern times, the worst phases of parental despotism have 
 passed away. But much of its spirit lingers still.' Parents their rights atid 
 are still too prone to think only of their rights and not of Duties their 
 their sacred and responsible duties as well, still too much 
 inclined to pose before their children as their great benefactors, without 
 considering that their children are not the benefited from their own choice, 
 and that the sunshine and merriment of their sweet and innocent infancy 
 and gay and happy childhood more than return all the benefits they 
 receive, still too eager to din into their children's ears what reverence they 
 owe their parents, without remembering, that there is a reverence which 
 parents, above all others, owe their children, a reverence which, if shown 
 to children from the earliest stages of their lives, would make their rever- 
 encing their parents the first and the last and the most beautiful of all 
 their virtues. 
 
 Such parental reverence does not show itself in outward form and 
 ceremony. It lies nearer to the fountain of affection, and closer to the 
 seat of intellect. It reveals itself in the conscientious 
 spirit in which father and mother assume the sacred office ^no^child^etf 11 
 of parenthood. It reveals itself in the manner in which 
 they feel themselves impressed with the awful responsibility of shaping 
 the career of a human being for glory or shame, for success or failure, for 
 life or death. ' It reveals itself in the mode in which they enter upon the 
 discharge of the sacred office of parenthood, piously resolved never to 
 allow a private pleasure or a public duty to crowd itself between them and 
 their child, that no study shall be too difficult, no burden too heavy, no 
 sacrifice too great, for the proper raising of that tender bud of life that 
 God has entrusted to their care and keeping. 
 
 It would be difficult to find among all the reverences a single one on 
 whose faithful discharge more of individual and communal happiness 
 depends than on this, and equally difficult would it be to 
 find a reverence more sinned against than this. Never ^i 
 have children sinned half as much against their parents 
 as parents have against their children. Never have children been half as 
 ignorant of the duties they owe their parents, as parents have been igno-
 
 rant of the duties they owe their children. For every tear 'a.n "ungrateful 
 child has forced from parent's eye, a thousand have been forced from 
 children on account of parental neglect. For every parent forced by an 
 undutiful child into an untimely grave, a thousand precious blossoms of 
 humanity have been forced to exchange the cradle for the grave on 
 account of parental ignorance. For every parent forced to totter to his 
 grave neglected and forsaken by his own children, a thousand children 
 have staggered through life under the load of disease, corruption, vicious 
 habits, laid upon them by neglectful parents. One-half of the crimes that 
 the criminal court is obliged to deal with, might have been cured on 
 parent's knee. Half the vices that infest society might have been rooted 
 out in childhood as easily as is the weed from garden-bed, had but parents 
 acquainted themselves with its existence, and with the proper means for 
 its eradication. 
 
 Often when I hear parents complaining of the misconduct of their 
 children, I hear them telling at the same time their own neglect and 
 ignorance. It was the Philosopher Plato, I believe, who 
 n are made it: his business to correct the parent instead of his 
 misbehaving child. How could the child act differently 
 abroad, when never differently taught at home ? Or how could a child 
 be differently taught at home, when parents have not the faintest notion 
 of the proper raising of children, or if they have, will not sacrifice their 
 time and pleasure, and make a slave of themselves for their child, when 
 they can get a nurse-girl to tend it for a paltry sum ? One of our news- 
 papers reported the other day this little conversation between a policeman 
 and a little nurse-girl, who was wheeling a baby-coach, accompanied by a 
 few children, and by a noisy and troublesome dog. " Do you have to 
 take care of the dog?" asked the Policeman, to which the little nurse- 
 girl replied : "No; the missis says I'm too young and inexperienced. 
 I only look after the children. ' ' 
 
 laughable as this little episode is, it conveys a tearful rather than an 
 amusing story. We open the right of parenthood to all, without making 
 physical and moral and intellectual fitness for that sacred and responsible 
 relationship a legal and a moral pre-requisite. Young m^ried couples 
 with little ones at home, often hurl themselves into those whirlpools of 
 society-dissipations and excitements, which, if they have a place at all, 
 belong to the less responsible period of single life. It is a frequent com- 
 plaint of unmarried society people that their greatest rivals are married 
 people, who ought to be at home at the side of the cradle, or in the nur- 
 sery in the company of their growing and developing children, instead of 
 leaving them to hired domestics, or to aged and decrepit relatives, or 
 under the influence of all sorts of sleep-inducing drugs. Night after night, 
 afternoon after afternoon, children are left to themselves, or to the care 
 of those worse than themselves. Their little tongues that long to ask a 
 thousand questions of their parents, their little arms that long to twine 
 'themselves around their parents' necks, like the tendrils of the vine 
 around the sturdy oak, their little heads that long to rest on parents'
 
 bosom, their innocent eyes that fain would look into parents' eyes 
 before sinking to sleep, find no such sweet occupation. I have read 
 of a mother who made it a practice always to take her little girl in 
 her arms just before being sent to bed, and to hold her close to her 
 heart for a while, looking into her eyes, then kissing the little one, say- 
 ing, " That is good-night, dear ; go to bed like a good little girl." One 
 afternoon the mother was detained from home until late at night. Re- 
 turning, the parents were met at the door by the little girl, very wide 
 awake. Papa picked her up, carrying her to the nurse saying, "How is, 
 this? nearly eleven o'clock, and this child not asleep." " I couldn't coax 
 her to bed," said the girl ; "she insisted she must see her manima first." 
 " Papa," said the little maiden very seriously, " I tan't do to bed till I'se 
 yooked into my mamma's eyes;" and climbing into her mother's lap, 
 taking the maternal face between her two little hands, she gazed long 
 and earnestly into the eyes so necessary to her comfort then one long, 
 hearty hug by both, and she sprang to the floor, holding out her hand to, 
 the nurse, saying cheerily to papa, "I'se yeady now. Dood night."* 
 Ah, how rare are such scenes as these among our fashionable society- 
 people ! How rare are the opportunities of children fondly looking into 
 their mother's eyes before retiring, to draw from them that inspiration, 
 that love, that reverence that shall abide with them through life, that 
 shall save them from temptation and from wrong ! Slight as is the atten- 
 tion the little ones receive- during the character- forming periods of their 
 life from mothers who move in society, still less attention is accorded to 
 them by their fathers. They have no time for such sentimentalities. 
 They have serious matters to attend to. They have money to make, all 
 day long, and all week long, often the Sabbath-day included. The even- 
 ing finds them generally, when not seeking diversion away from home, 
 tired, or absorbed in the newspapers, or out of sorts, that the children are 
 never so happy than when furthest away from their parent. Oh, for 
 another Socrates to shout from the house tops ' ' What mean ye, fellow- 
 citizens, that ye turn every stone to scrape wealth together, and take so 
 little care of your children, to whom, one day, you must relinquish it all," 
 and who, perhaps, will waste and squander it all the sooner by reason of 
 parental neglect. 
 
 Parental neglect is not the worst evil that helpless and innocent 
 children have to contend against, parental ignorance is by far their great- 
 est foe. Of home-staying, and their children-minding 
 
 How children are 
 parents we have an overwhelmingly larger number than ruined by pareu- 
 
 of those gay society-folks, who look upon children as a tl 
 troublesome incumbrance, and are happiest when without them. All 
 would have been well, if to their home- and children-loving virtues they 
 would yet have added a knowledge of how to train children's hearts and. 
 souls and minds and hands aright, or, mindful of the Law of Heredity, 
 how to fit themselves physically, morally, intellectually, before yet chosen 
 for the office of parenthood. It was Goethe who said: "Afan konnte 
 
 *Mrs. S. C. Jones, " The Co-Education of Parent and Child."
 
 erzogene Kinder gebaren, wenn die Eltern erzogen wdren," that it were 
 easy to raise well-trained children, if well-trained the parents were them- 
 selves. But such well-trained parents are rarities. With all the aid that 
 modern knowledge gives, with all the information on child-nature that 
 physiologists and psychologists are only too eager to impart, with all the 
 literature on the proper training of children at their command, there is a 
 woful, a criminal, ignorance of how to rear children physically healthy 
 and morally and intellectually sound, as the hundreds of little graves in 
 our cemeteries, the thousand inmates of hospitals, asylums, penal and 
 corrective institutes, as the tens of thousands ruined characters, stifled 
 talents, blasted lives, tearfully prove. Where positive knowledge can be 
 had, parents choose to experiment, and frivolously they turn into a piece of 
 guess-work what should be treated as an exact science. Time enough, 
 they think, to train children, when they shall have grown sufficiently to 
 understand or to be reasoned with, or when they shall get into the teach- 
 er's hand at school. Little do they dream that the education of a child, 
 that is in possession of all its faculties, begins at the moment it first 
 beholds the light of day not to go as far back as distinguished scientists 
 go, who assure us that a child's training commences when that of its 
 parents and grandparents begins The younger its days the more active 
 its sense-perception. To its wondering little eyes and ears every surround- 
 ing sight and sound is strange and novel, and not one of them fails to 
 stamp itself upon its young and receptive mind. Thicker and thicker 
 the painter Observation lays the colors on the Life-Picture that is to be, 
 and that will never never fade. Faster and faster its glowing and liquid 
 mind pours itself into the mould that environment shapes for it, and 
 where it gradually hardens into permanent, unchangeable form. Facial 
 features, voice, language, action, copy more and more those of the people 
 surrounding it. Silently the little threads of Observation and Experience 
 twist themselves, even in the cradle, into traits and habits, till threads 
 grow into cords, and cords into ropes, and ropes gradually into cables, 
 which not all the after-training of after-life can break. 
 
 Yes, Parents, change the reading of the Fifth Commandment to: 
 ' Honor thy son and thy daughter, that thy days may be long.' Honor 
 
 them when young, and they will honor you when you 
 Honor thy chil- 
 dren and thy are old. As you deal with them so will they deal with 
 days will be long. yQU Honor t h e m with proper preparation for, and with 
 conscientious discharge of, the office of parenthood. Honor them with 
 considering parenthood holy, and childhood holier still. Honor them by 
 sacredly keeping from their developing mind every noxious influence. 
 There is a bird in the tropics that uses for the construction of its nest a 
 certain leaf the aroma of which is poison to serpents. When a serpent, 
 climbing after the dainty morsel, comes in front of such a nest, it drops 
 from the tree as if struck by lightning. Thus, parents, surround ye your 
 little ones with those protecting influences which will put every evil to 
 flight that ventures near them. Honor them with a pure personal 
 example, remembering that parents' actions are the models children
 
 pattern theirs after. Honor them with the gentle word of persuasion in 
 preference to the harsh command of authority or the keen sting of pun- 
 ishment. Alpine climbers tell us that at certain seasons in the spring the 
 traveller must beware of making the slightest noise while ascending, for 
 often the winter's accumulated snow hangs so threateningly on the steep 
 slopes above, that a loud word, or the striking of the Alpine-stick against 
 a stone suffices to start an avalanche, that dashes to destruction every- 
 thing that lies in its path. So does often a parent's loud word of anger 
 or painful chastisement, start within the child an avalanche of passion of 
 stubbornness, of rebellion, of viciousness, that utterly ruins what might 
 have proven a noble character. Honor them with your frequent converse 
 and companionship. Leave not to nurse what is a mother's sacred task, 
 nor to teacher what is a father's solemn duty. Honor them with not 
 being over-indulgent nor unreasonably severe. Think no sacrifice too 
 great to win their confidence and their love. Early make them feel that 
 though the whole world may condemn and spurn, their parents will for- 
 give them if repentant, that though all the world may turn them from 
 their doors, their parents' hearts and homes will always stand wide open 
 to them. A young Scotch girl was lured one day from her quiet country 
 home to London, where she speedily went astray. Day after day, week 
 after week, her poor w r idowed mother, peered up and dow r n the road, hop- 
 ing for her daughter's return. One evening, while sitting in front of the 
 hearth, thinking of her wayward child, she heard a footfall on the floor. 
 Before her stood her repentant daughter. After the surprise, confession 
 and forgiveness were over, the daughter asked: "How came it, mother, 
 that at this late and lonely hour of the night I found the latch of the 
 cottage open?" "The latch has never been shut day or night since you 
 left me," was the mother's answer; "I feared that if you came and found 
 it shut, you might turn away forever." 
 
 Thus honor your sons and your daughters, ye parents, rich or poor, 
 and ye shall find that: 
 
 "Aeque pauperibus prodest, locupletibus aeque ; 
 Et, neglecta, aeque pueris senibusque nocebit." Horace, Up. I. 25. 
 
 "It profits poor and rich alike. 
 
 But, neglected, equally it hurts young and old " 
 
 and you will find that the race of the Gonerils and Regans will disappear, 
 while the Cordelias will hold sway in every home; that peace and happi- 
 ness will rule your households and add many a happy day to your lives; 
 that as the hearts of the parents are turned to their children, those of the 
 children turn to their parents, that children will no longer suffer for their 
 parents, nor parents for their children, that there will be no more Byrons 
 to lament that 
 
 . . "Untaught in youth my heart to tame 
 My springs of life were poisoned " 
 
 but no end of Popes to exclaim: "My parents never cost me a blush, and 
 their son never cost them a tear." 
 
 ERRATA : Change in preceding lecture (No. 21) the word debtor, in the couplet on 
 page 9, to the word doctor; and the word not, on the third from the last line of the same 
 page, to but; and the word less, on the eighth from the first line on page 10, to loss.
 
 Slay the Sin but not the Sinner. 
 
 RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 
 Philadelphia, March 27th, 1892. 
 
 (Exod. xx. 13) m-*n jo 
 (Ezek. xxxiii. n) rrm iD^no yw~\ 21 BO ox 'D ;'5jnn mo3 "snx ON 
 
 " Xot for the death of the sinner pray 
 But for the death of sin." 
 
 Talmud, Berachoth, 10 a. 
 
 Never before did I realize how much of a world in miniature a mod- 
 ern newspaper is, how vividly it mirrors mankind's latest joy and sorrow, 
 gain and loss, progress and regress, humanity and bar- 
 barity, as I did a few days ago, while perusing one of our . i t inful C n " 
 morning papers. Conspicuous on the front page there 
 were two columns, side by side, each headed by glaring headlines; the 
 one attracting the reader's attention to a rare virtue, the other to a 
 barbarity most horrible ; the one telling of man's love for his fellow-man, 
 the other of his cruel hatred; the one speaking of noble efforts and 
 sacrifices to save human life, the other narrating in sickening detail the 
 story of a brutal strangulation of a human being ; the one carrying us to 
 the sea-port town Libau in Russia, and making us eye-witnesses of the 
 landing of the steamer Indiana, that had left our port a fortnight before, 
 and of the unloading of the provisions our people sent to the famine- 
 stricken districts, and of the great rejoicing over American generosity, 
 the other conveying us to the capital of Austria, into a prison-court, to 
 witness a scene, which, in bold, attractive type, it describes as follows : 
 "Schneider Strangled." "A Silken Loop Attached To A Stake Used." 
 "His Face Covered By The Executioner's Hands." "Assistants Grasp 
 His Arms And Legs And Pull Downward." "Death Results In Four 
 Minutes." "A Sight Long To Be Remembered By The Spectators." 
 
 But for the fact that both of these conspicuously recorded events bore 
 the same date, we could not but have believed that whole ages lay between 
 the two, that the one was the latest product of modern 
 civilization, the other a tale of Dark-Age cruelty, so beau- 
 tiful, so noble, so divine, is the one, and so horrible, so 
 inhuman, so fiendish, is the other. There is yet another reason, besides 
 the date, that would have prevented our locating the Viennese strangu- 
 lation in the Barbarous Ages, and that is the make-up of the executioner. 
 His was not the conventional uniform of the hangman of by-gone ages, 
 no fire-red costume, no black mask. He was rigged out in the latest
 
 style of the fashion-plate, he wore, ' ' a high silk hat, fine clothing, and 
 kid gloves," while the loop he u*d was of silken fabric. What refine- 
 ment of cruelty ! A silken loop around the victim's throat ; the kid- 
 gloved hand of a stylishly dressed gentleman firmly holding mouth and 
 nostrils shut, while ' two horse-slaughterers grasp the hanging man by 
 his arms and legs, and pull downward with all their strength. ' Such the 
 mode of judicially strangling the life out of a condemned human being, 
 in the presence of his judges, and of high officials of the realm, in the 
 capital of Austria, in the year Eighteen Hundred and Ninety Two! 
 
 An account so revolting, alongside a column portraying one of the 
 most beautiful traits of human nature, furnishes a striking illustration of 
 
 how the divine and the brutish still contend for suprem- 
 Juve vrithhius ac ^ w ithin modern society, how readily the one may gain 
 
 ascendancy over the other, how a heart-rending account 
 of human suffering will arouse a whole people to active and helpful sym- 
 pathy, while the perpetration of a heinous outrage will inflame our pas- 
 sions into an inhuman thirst for revenge. And, moreover, it dispels the 
 fond hope that we had begun to cherish, after the abolition of Capital 
 Punishment in a few of the foreign countries, and in four of our own States,. , 
 and after the introduction in our neighboring state of electrocution as a 
 mode of execution, that the days of Capital Punishment were numbered, 
 that mankind had sufficiently advanced in its humanities to punish crime 
 in a less revolting though in a no less efficient manner. With the mem- 
 ories of the New Orleans and Memphis murderous mobs, of the horrible 
 burning at the stake of a human being a woman's hand lighting the 
 pyre recently enacted in the State of Arkansas, of the recent Viennese 
 barbarous strangulation, fresh in our minds, it is hard to believe that the 
 baser human passions have been softened, that we are less cruel than 
 were our ancestors a decade of centuries ago, or than are the savages of 
 the present day. 
 
 It is true, we no longer resort to those appalling measures, which 
 former ages adopted for the punishment of the highest crimes. We have 
 
 no such torture-chambers as the Dark- and Middle-Ages 
 hfby-gcme'days boasted o f. We have no such soul-harrowing cpntrivan- 
 
 ces as European Museums still exhibit, and that once 
 were in active and in frequent operation. We no longer nail criminals to- 
 the cross, or suspend them on breast- or shoulder-piercing spikes, on 
 which they endure nameless tortures, are assailed by birds of prey and 
 insects, burnt by the sun, maddened by hunger and thirst, till death 
 comes to their relief. We no longer roast them over a slow fire, or im- 
 mure them alive. We do not throw them as food to ferocious beasts> 
 neither do we crush them under the feet of angered elephants. We no- 
 longer strap them down, drill holes into their bodies into which lighted 
 tapers are set, which, burning lower and lower into the flesh, "illumi- 
 nate" them into a most agonizing death. We no longer pour molten lead 
 into their throats, nor hurl them into seething caldrons. We no longer 
 tear them asunder on the public squares by means of spirited animals.
 
 hitched to each limb, nor do we break their every joint and limb on the 
 wheel ; nor do we resort to any of those other monstrous cruelties too 
 ghastly and too frightful to mention. True as this is and God be thanked 
 that it is when, however, we contrast man as he is to-day softened by 
 more peaceful environment and greater ease and culture, with man of 
 former times hardened by constant wars and bloodsheds and privations 
 and struggles, it is a question to my mind whether the former cruel modes 
 of inflicting Capital Punishment were as harrowing to the culprit and to 
 the public, as are our more refined neck-breaking trap-floors, or electric 
 currents, or silken loops adjusted by kid-gloved and fashionably attired 
 gentlemen-hangmen. 
 
 I know the thought that now is foremost in the minds of many. 
 They, too, object to the Viennese strangulation, but for far different 
 reasons. It is its leniency that they find fault with. , 
 
 Instead of kid gloves they would have handled him with account of enor- 
 thorn-spiked cestUs, and in place of silken loop they toit y of crime - 
 would have used an iron chain. Upon the execution of that monster, who 
 heartlessly decoyed, and mercilessly strangled to death, innocent and 
 confiding young women, they would have piled cruelty upon cruelty, and 
 suffering upon suffering, till their death penalty would have equaled, or 
 eclipsed, the most cruel method of former ages. 
 
 And why would they use such cruel measures ? Is it to bring the 
 criminal's victims back to life? Were all the sufferings of all the ima- 
 gined hells to be visited upon the murderer, they would 
 
 . ,,,. Turns capital 
 
 not succeed in restoring the murdered unto life. Or has punishment into 
 
 he more than one life that human power can slay ? If he reven S e - 
 has, human knowledge has not yet discovered it. Is it to rid society of 
 his presence, and of his power of doing evil ? Society will not be any 
 the better protected from him when he suffers a protracted and a cruel 
 execution, as when he meets with an instantaneous and a painless death. 
 Does not such desire for cruel death penalties arise rather from a spirit of 
 revenge than from a love of justice? Does not the fact of a detailed 
 account of a horrible execution being wired across continents and oceans, 
 to peoples in no direct way effected by the death of the murderer and his 
 murdered victims, and of being conspicuously published in the leading 
 journals of the world, does not the prominence given to all executions, 
 show only too plainly how much of the brute there is still within us, what 
 fascinations sensational accounts of murders and butcheries, whether law- 
 ful or unlawful, still have for us, and how profitable newspapers find it to 
 cater to such brutish cravings ? 
 
 "Not at all!" "Not at all!" some of you will say. The desire to 
 see the murderer cruelly executed does not at all arise from a spirit of 
 revenge, nor from brutish instincts. It emanates from 
 one of the noblest sentiments of the human heart. It has tobe^deterrenL 
 for its object the saving of human life. The guilty shall 
 die a shameful death that the innocent may live. The whole world's
 
 attention shall be drawn to the execution of a murderer, that other would- 
 be-murderers may be deterred from following his example, and from 
 suffering a similar miserable and painful death. 
 
 If this be the reason why so much publicity is given to executions, 
 
 if their shocking brutalities are intended to strike terror into the human 
 
 soul, and to paralyze every hand lifted with murderous 
 
 If deterrent, why . * . 
 
 painless death intent against a human being, then the introduction of 
 methods that shall rob the execution of its shame and 
 pain and publicity, defeats that purpose. If the condemned murderer 
 shall suffer an instantaneous and painless death, with as little knowledge 
 of it as possible outside the prison-gates, what purpose does his death sub- 
 serve ? It is of no benefit to the murderer nor to those he murdered. It 
 exercises no deterrent influence. It can only gratify a thirst for revenge. 
 It cannot be for the purpose of self-protection, for, surely, so powerful a 
 State as ours, for instance, could protect itself against its few murderers, 
 by securely confining them behind bars and bolts, without laying violent 
 hands on their life. If it be ^ue, that brutal executions exercise a deter- 
 rent influence on others, then every State, that has the life and well- 
 being of its subjects truly at heart, is duty-bound to abolish its swift and 
 painless and secluded death-penalty, to enact the most cruel methods of 
 by-gone ages, and to hail him as the greatest benefactor of human kind, 
 who contrives yet more soul-harrowing and blood-curdling methods than 
 have ever been known before. 
 
 But facts and experiences do not seem to confirm the claims that have 
 been set up for the deterrent influence of cruel executions or of any other 
 kind of Capital Punishment. If anything, they prove 
 *^ e contrary, that Capital Punishment rather encourages 
 
 Penalty not a than checks crime, and for reasons that seem quite clear. 
 
 The criminal classes and those easiest tempted to crime 
 are, as a rule, composed of people, who are either mentally deficient, or 
 weak in will-power, or who have perverted notions of right and wrong, or 
 who are inordinately vain or ambitious or sensational. The graphic 
 accounts of sensational murder trials easily excite them. The notoriety of 
 the tried and condemned criminal inflames their vanity. The detailed 
 reports that are spread broadcast of the conduct of the condemned during 
 his last days and last hours, the gushing sentimentalities that are lavished 
 upon him, the sympathies which his approaching fate arouse, the pictorial 
 illustrations of the final scene on the scaffold, appeal to their baser passions, 
 quicken and strengthen the brute instincts, arouse a burning thirst for 
 similar notoriety, which often is not quenched till they become heroes of 
 tragedies of their own. 
 
 It is an old experience in police-circles, that sensational murder trials 
 and much talked of executions, often even when only enacted in the 
 
 latest sensational novel or drama, are generally followed 
 ^rinfe tempter to by a large retinue of imitators. Jack the Ripper has 
 
 found imitators in all parts of the world. It is safe to 
 assert, that were sensational reports of murders withheld from the public
 
 press, were murder-trials restricted to the court-rooms, where they prop- 
 erly belong, and access to them granted only to such who have real busi- 
 ness there, were less inflammatory reports published of executions, or far 
 better still, were Capital Punishment entirely abolished, and its place 
 taken by the less heroic and less sympathy- and sentimentality-arousing 
 punishment of imprisonment for life, or for such a time till the criminal 
 is wholly cured of his criminal tendencies, a strong tempter to crime 
 would be removed from the weak-minded and weak-willed, and within a 
 short time we would perceive an appreciable diminution of crime. 
 
 This is not a theorist's supposition; it is a fact attested by the penal 
 experiences of civilized lands, and emphasized by the greatest alienists of 
 
 the world. There are statistics to prove that every addi- 
 
 | , , , Where most cruel 
 
 tion of torture to execution was followed by a correspond- there murder 
 
 ing increase of criminals condemned to suffer the death r requent. 
 penalty, and that frequently it was but necessary to relax the rigor in the 
 torture-chamber or on the scaffold to check epidemics of crime. There 
 are facts and figures enough to prove, that there are persons that are most 
 tempted to crime when rigorous penalties are inflicted for it, and that 
 extreme tortures seem to exercise the same irresistible fascination upon 
 them that snakes exercise upon birds, which, once under the charm of the 
 serpentine eye, can no more away from it, but must rush into the jaws of 
 death. We need but take a peep into the penal history of England to 
 assure ourselves, that when the death penalty is frequently inflicted, and 
 for paltry offenses, executions are carried on by the wholesale, and hangmen 
 have a busy time of it. When the gallows were used as punishment for 
 offenses such as cutting down a fruit tree, associating with gypsies, lead- 
 ing the life of a vagrant, stealing a handkerchief above the value of a 
 twelve-pence, when about a century ago a child of twelve could be exe- 
 cuted for rioting, and less than half a century ago a child of nine could 
 be hung for stealing paint of the value of two pence-half penny, we can- 
 not be surprised at the statement of a writer in Elizabeth's reign that " in 
 Henry VIII's time seventy-two thousand thieves and vagabonds were 
 hanged," nor can we wonder that the distinguished legal authority, Sir 
 William Blackstone, should have called the attention of people and gov- 
 ernment to the fact, that the frequency of the death penalty " instead of 
 diminishing, increases the number of offenders."* So much for the deter- 
 rent influence of Capital Punishment ! 
 
 Almost on the threshold of the Twentieth Century, it is the highest 
 time that we learn the lesson these facts and figures and statistics teach. 
 As long as we continue judicial executions, we popularize 
 unlawful murder. As long as we keep the spectacle of A temp Lvnchers 
 putting a human being to death conspicuously before the 
 eyes of criminally-inclined, weak-minded, weak-willed, perverted-notioned 
 people we but tempt them to rival their teachers. As long as we arrogate 
 unto ourselves the right of punishing certain crimes with death, we en- 
 courage others to do the same for what they deem crime, without the 
 
 *Green's : Crime, Art. Ill, Chap, v ; Kllis': " The Criminal," Chap. VI.
 
 preliminaries and technicalities f the Law. If we set the example of 
 stringing up a fellow for taking the life of a fellow-being, we must not be 
 surprised that "Judge Lynch" should consider himself equally entitled 
 to exercise the same right for equal and even for less serious offenses. 
 Often even he has more justice on his side than we have. His circuit lies, 
 as a rule, in uncultured districts, or in thinly populated regions, that are 
 poorly provided with prisons and courts. We, however, have all the pro- 
 tection we need. We have safe and well-guarded prisons. We have just 
 courts. We have powerful means at our command for preventing the 
 criminal from again endangering the life of a fellow-being. Our inflict- 
 ing the death-penalty, therefore, since it benefits neither the murdered, 
 nor the murderer, nor deters others from crime, has simply the giatifica- 
 tion of a revengeful spirit for, its object, and we have little reason to com- 
 plain of the vindictiveness of lynchers, when they but do in an undisguised 
 manner what we do under the sanctimonious cloak of Law, and when they, 
 for the most part, do under the impulse of intense excitement and blind- 
 ing passion what we do in all calmness, with deliberation, and in cold 
 blood. With the gallows erected, as a tempting model to copy, in the 
 penitentiaries of all our States, excepting four, we are not surprised at the 
 following figures collected by the Chicago Tribune : 
 
 " Six years of United States murders (1884-1889 inclusive). 
 
 
 Murders. 
 
 Legal Executions. 
 
 I y ynchings. 
 
 884 ... 
 
 3,377 
 
 103 
 
 219 
 
 885 . 
 
 . 1,808 . 
 
 .108. 
 
 181 
 
 886 ... 
 
 i,499 
 
 . - 83 . . 
 
 133 
 
 887 . ' 
 
 2,335 
 
 . 79 . 
 
 . 123 
 
 888 . . . . 
 S8g . . ' . 
 
 2,184 
 
 . . 87 . 
 . 98 . 
 
 144 
 I 75 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 Total of 6 years 
 
 14,77 
 
 558 
 
 975 
 
 Hence, of nearly 15,000 known murders in the six years, less than four percent, were 
 followed by legal executions. In the four States where the capital penalty is abolished, 
 conditions are stated by competent authorities to be more satisfactory than elsewhere. 
 The lynchings nearly all take place in States which retain the gallows. 
 
 Maine abolished capital punishment in 1876, restored it in 1883, and again abolished 
 it in 1887. The Warden of the State prison (Mr. S. H. Allen) writes (1890) : " I think it 
 is the general feeling that murders are no more frequent now than when the death 
 penalty existed." The Warden of Rhode Island State Prison (Mr. Nelson Viall) also 
 writes (1890) : I do not believe the death penalty will ever be restored in our State, or 
 that the crime of murder has increased in consequence of the change." 
 
 And for the sake of an average of between two or three executions in 
 a State, a year, we keep up what some one has epigramatically described 
 
 as " the shameful practice of hiring for a guinea anassas- 
 urcler. s ^ n to accomplish a sentence which the judge would not 
 
 have the courage to carry out, ' ' and indirectly encourage, 
 Heaven only knows ! how much of unlawful murder. And worse still, 
 who can tell how many of the hundred legal executions, that disgrace our 
 land each year, are not really murders ? Without at all entering to-day 
 into the question of the mental and moral responsibility of the condemned, 
 of how frequently the criminal is irresponsible for his crime, of how
 
 frequently his crime is attributable to inherited criminal tendencies, to- 
 homicidal monomania, to moral alienation, whose presence and irresistible 
 sway elude the understanding and the observation of judge and witness 
 and jury, and whose crime should be expunged not on the gallows but 
 'in a Penal-Hospital, without entering this morning upon this phase of the 
 question, who can tell of the awful mistakes that are not infrequently 
 made, and that are beyond all human power of reparation ? Who knows 
 not how near many an innocent man has been to suffering the penalty of 
 death on the gallows for a crime which he never committed, though cir- 
 cumstantial evidence strongly pointed to him, and which penalty he 
 would have paid, had it not been for an accidental discovery of his inno- 
 cence just in the nick of time ? Is not Mr. Chalkley Leconey's case, 
 across the Delaware, a year or so ago, still fresh in our memories ? How 
 strongly circumstantial evidence pointed against him, and how near 
 suffering legal murder ! The following clipping from our Public Ledger, 
 shortly after Mr. I,econey's acquittal, conveys as triking illustration of 
 how easy it is at times to fasten guilt upon innocent persons, and to make 
 them suffer innocently a disgraceful death: 
 
 "In the same paper which contained the announcement of the acquittal of Chalkley 
 Leconey was an account of a fatal accident which had just occurred in Philadelphia. 
 An old woman, over eighty years of age, was badly burned by her clothing taking fire 
 The only person in the house was her son, who was burned seriously in trying to extin- 
 guish the flames. She was taken to the hospital, and he was arrested on suspicion. 
 
 The mother, in her anguish, had moaned out" that it was her son's fault. She after- 
 wards explained that she meant he was not so prompt as he should have been in putting 
 out the flames. He was asleep on a settee when she let the lighted paper fall on her 
 dress, and was probably bewildered by the fearful sight when awakened. Had she died 
 without explanation, what would have been the position of that son ? Who could have 
 declared his innocence ?" 
 
 And from Nebraska there recently came the news of the honorable dis- 
 charge of Warren Clough, after fourteen years imprisonment for the 
 supposed murder of his brother, and released through the dying confes- 
 sion of the real murderer. Warren's brother had been found dead in his 
 barn, at Stewart, Neb. and all the money the brother had on the day 
 before was in Warren's possession rightly in payment of debts. His- 
 defence, and the change of hanging, to which he was sentenced, to im- 
 prisonment for life cost him $ 10,000. His wife got a divorce, and married 
 another man, while he was unjustly in prison. It was fortunate, that he 
 had money enough to make a noble fight for his life, else, he would have 
 suffered innocently an ignoble death on the gallows, and no after-confes- 
 sion could have repaired the awful wrong. 
 
 But only the fewest have money enough to carry on s.uch a fight, and 
 for the want of it, many a one has been legally murdered for some other's- 
 guilt, according to Sir James Mackintosh's declaration, as quoted in an 
 editorial in the New York Sun, some months ago, at least one in every 
 three years, in England, and how many in this country, with our fond- 
 ness of convicting on circumstantial evidence, and with a plentiful supply 
 of disliked foreigners and of poor and ignorant and much-abused negroes-
 
 to be made scape-goats of for other men's guilt, God alone knows. Capi- 
 tal Punishment continuing, what assurance have we that what has hap- 
 pened to others may not happen to you or me ? Who is safe from being 
 seized at any moment, and brought to trial under the charge of murder, 
 by reason of certain accidental coincidences and circumstances that seem 
 suspiciously to point against us ? Who is safe from being strung up with- 
 out regard to professions of innocence, especially when feelings run high, 
 and when the press, as it so frequently does now-a-days, conducts the 
 trial, and pronounces the sentence, before yet the case comes into court. 
 
 Such awful mistakes occurring, we are not surprised that thoughtful, 
 jurors should hesitate long, and tremble before the consequences of their 
 decision, and that in more settled and refined cominuni- 
 asjm-or serving ' ties there should be a growing disinclination to serving 
 as jurors in cases involving capital punishment. Nor 
 can we be surprised that mistakes should frequently be made on the other 
 side, that jurors, rather than run the risk of hanging an innocent or an 
 irresponsible man, will give the defendant every benefit of doubt, and set 
 him free, perhaps to continue his depredations. Many a criminal has- 
 thus been set free, who, for the protection of society, ought to have been 
 safely locked behind prison bars, and where he would have been, had 
 Capital Punishment been abolished, and had the jury had the right of 
 sentencing him for an indeterminate number of years of imprisoment, 
 securing to society the chance of correcting its error, and of making hon- 
 orable amends, if subsequent disclosures proved that mistakes were 
 made. 
 
 But, with our present only alternative of death or freedom for the man 
 tried for murder, and with a steadily growing preference for granting 
 
 freedom rather than run the risk of legallv murdering 
 Thereby the 
 guilty often es- an innocent person, with many a dangerous criminal set 
 
 encouraged m bS ^ ree * n consequence of rigorous law on the statute book 
 and lax administration in the jury box, it is not surpris- 
 ing that people, excited into uncontrollable passion by what seems to 
 them an unjust verdict, should now and then rise in a mob, take ven- 
 geance into their own hands, and perpetrate still more frightful outrages, 
 and make yet more grievous mistakes on the other side. With the awful 
 death-penalty on our statute-books, with gallows in our prison-courts, to 
 justify the right of legal murder, and with flagrant injustice often done 
 to society from fear of inflicting so revolting and so irreparable a punish- 
 ment, we must not wonder that Mob-and Lynch-Law should disgrace our 
 land, and that we should number annually twice as many lynchings as 
 legal executions. 
 
 Why continue this danger to defendant and to society? Why con- 
 tinue tempting the feeble-minded, the weak-willed, the vain and sensa- 
 tional and criminally-inclined, to murder, by such brutal 
 not y the e si S nn'er >Ut s P ectac ^ es f executions as was recently enacted in the 
 Capital of Austria, when we have it in our power to safely 
 imprison the criminal for life, or for an indeterminate number of years,.
 
 till thoroughly cured or reformed? Why continue on the threshold of 
 the Twentieth Century a barbarous and a vengeful mode of punishment, 
 which experience, past and present, has proven to be no deterrent of mur- 
 der, and to be followed by no increase of crime when abolished, as we 
 have observed in those of our own States, in which Capital Punishment 
 lias been abolished, and confirmed abroad, according to the Sun's edito- 
 rial, as follows: "It was abolished in Holland in 1870. Between 1861 and 
 1869 there were 19 murders; between 1871 and 1879 the number was only 
 17, despite an increase of population. In Finland there has been no exe- 
 cution since 1824, and yet murders are extremely rare; in Belgium none 
 since 1863, and yet the crime of murder has decreased. Portugal and 
 Roumania have abolished Capital Punishment without evil results." 
 
 Why not rather devote some of the time and interest and expense, 
 spent on the slaying of a sinner, upon slaying sin ? Erase the right 
 of Legal Murder from your Statute - Books. Tear down your Gal- 
 lows. Demolish your Electrocution-Chairs. They serve not Justice, they 
 but serve your Revenge. The Sixth Commandment: "T/iou shall not 
 murder ' ' applies to the prison-courts as well as to the precincts outside 
 of them. Spend no more time on the best mode of despatching criminals 
 into the other world. Spend it rather on devising the best ways and 
 means of eradicating crime. Prevent the breeding of crime or of crimi- 
 nal insanity. Break up your moral pest-houses. Tear down your White- 
 chapel districts, and scatter the pauper and criminal vermin that infest 
 them. Suffer not the aggregation of the vagrant and the unemployed, or 
 create labor for them to prevent starvation from forcing them to crime. 
 Reform your prison-disciplines. Make them reformatory instead of penal 
 institutes. Let not the man that enters a thief come forth a murderer. 
 Save the discharged prisoner from falling back into crime, by kindly 
 caring for him till able to care for himself. Cultivate kindlier sentiments 
 among the lower classes. Lessen the misery and filth that surrounds 
 them. Let not the saloon and the dive be their only source of pleasure. 
 Reserve not all your beautiful Parks and Squares and Fountains and Drives 
 and Avenues for the rich. Think of your alleys before you think of your 
 boulevards. Take a personal interest in the sad lot of the poor. Help 
 them to find' employment, direct them, encourage them, elevate them, 
 .and you will do infinitely more towards checking crime by slaying sin 
 than gallows and garrots and guillotines. have done by slaying the sinner.
 
 The Sanctity of the Home. 
 
 ^I JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 Philadelphia, April jd, 1892. 
 
 (Exod. xx, 14) 
 
 " A glance of heaven to see 
 To none on earth is given ; 
 And yet a happy family 
 Is but an earlier heaven." 
 
 The Midi-ash* relates a conversation between Rabbi Jose and a Roman 
 matron, in which he maintained, that : marriages were predestined in 
 heaven, and she: that it required no God to effect marital 
 unions, that almost any one could turn man and woman j^Yea^n m 
 into husband and wife. She proposed to give him a prac- 
 tical illustration of the truth of what she claimed. After his departure, 
 she summoned her unmarried male and female slaves; placed the different 
 sexes in rows, opposite each other, and then paired them off, at haphazard, 
 just as they chanced to face each other. But, in a little while, the newly 
 married couples appeared, one after the other, before her, with blackened 
 eyes, and bleeding faces, and broken limbs, complaining bitterly of the 
 mates she had given them, and begging to be freed from their insufferable 
 yoke. She was convinced of the truth of the Rabbi's words, and hesitated 
 not to confess it to him, when again they met, the Rabbi supplementing 
 his former remarks with the saying, that: the linking in happy wedlock 
 of well-mated people is the work of God, and even for Him as great a task 
 as was the dividing of the Red Sea.f 
 
 I cannot vouch for the historic truth of this story, but I am strongly 
 inclined to believe the moral truth which it purports to teach. I believe 
 in the divineness of the institution of marriage. I see in 
 that strange, mysterious, irresistible fascination, which one vtne'instituticm 
 man and one woman have for each other, and for each 
 other only, out of all the human species, I see in the violent and inex- 
 tinguishable flames, that love suddenly kindles within the heart and brain 
 of one man and one woman, and that burn and burn, and rage, and reach 
 out towards each other until, overcoming all difficulties and all obstacles, 
 they exultingly meet and unite, I see in the passionate longing that sud- 
 denly springs up in the hearts of one man and one woman for each other's 
 constant companionship, who before were proof against all of Cupid's arts 
 
 *A compendium of ancient Jewish Homilies, Parables and Legends. 
 tMidrash Rab., Gen. 68.
 
 and darts, often after but their first meeting, often before yet a word has 
 passed between them, or before yet they know their names or stations, 
 often without possessing any of the external attractions of physical beauty, 
 of fortune or fame, I see in all this, a mystic, supernatural force, coming 
 from on high, to link into holy and happy matrimony the one man and 
 the one woman, who have been divinely destined for each other, and who 
 cannot be kept asunder, or enter into other marital alliances, without 
 violating God's decree, without ruining their own lives' happiness and 
 that of others. 
 
 Who knows but that the Hindoo is right in believing, that: the man 
 and the woman, who upon their first meeting suddenly and truly and 
 
 lastingly fall in love with each other, have met before; 
 Faithful couples . . 
 
 remarry in differ- that the rapturous feeling within them at the first sight 
 
 of each other, is but each soul's recognition of its former 
 mate, that the two had lived in happy wedlock before, that in the slow 
 evolution of the species the same two souls marry and die in one state, 
 and reappear on earth, and marry and die again in another, higher state, 
 till the human species is reached, and to be repeated again and again in 
 the various higher stages of life that shall follow this. You remember 
 how prettily this belief is told by Sir Edwin Arnold, in his charming Epic 
 "The Light of Asia," in that part in whichhe speaks of the meeting and 
 wooing and wedding of Prince Buddha and fair Yasodhara. It had been 
 decreed in high council that the king's son, Prince Buddha, should be 
 given in marriage to one of India's daughters. The fairest maidens of 
 the realm were invited to compete with their beauty and grace and skill 
 for the prince's hand and heart. From all parts Sakyas beautiful daugh- 
 ters came, each wishing in her heart to win so proud a prize. One after 
 the other appeared hopefully and tremblingly before his throne to receive 
 the reward of her skill from his hand. But the prize for which each flut- 
 tering heart yearned the most, Siddartha's love, none of them won. 
 
 " Thus filed they, one bright maid after another, 
 The city's flowers, and all this beauteous march 
 Was ending and the prizes spent, when last 
 Came young Yasodhara, and they that stood 
 Nearest Siddartha saw the princely boy 
 Start, as the radiant girl approached . . . 
 
 And their eyes mixed, and from the look sprang love. 
 Long after when enlightenment was full 
 Lord Buddha being prayed why thus his heart 
 Took fire at first glance of the Sakya girl, 
 Answered,: " We were not strangers as to us 
 And all it seemed." 
 
 Continuing, he tells the story how, long ages back, they had met, he then 
 a tiger, and she a tigress fair and brave, and how they had mated and 
 lived happily together until death; and how, in ages later, they had met 
 again, he then a hunter, and she a forest girl, to whom one day, as um- 
 pire in a race between swift-footed girls, as prize he 
 
 " Gave a tame fawn and his heart's love beside. 
 And in the wood they lived many glad years,
 
 And in the wood they undivided died. 
 
 Lo! as hid seed shoots after rainless years. 
 
 So good arid evil, pains and pleasures, hates 
 
 And loves, and all dead deeds, come forth again 
 
 Bearing bright leaves or dark, sweet fruit or sour. 
 
 Thus I was he and she Yasodhara; 
 
 And while the wheel of death and birth turns round. 
 
 That which hath been must be between us two." 
 
 Arnold's "The Light of Asia." Bk. II. 
 
 Poetic and fascinating is this Hindoo belief of the continuous remar- 
 riage in the succeeding ages of faithful and devoted pairs, and the old 
 Jewish belief that marriages are made in heaven, that each 
 has his mate divinely assigned. He that holds either of ^liSf ful P eti 
 these beliefs has at his side a powerful aid to explain the 
 often inexplicable, mysterious charm that one particular man and one 
 particular woman exercise upon each other, their passionate love at first 
 sight, their unconquerable yearning for each other's inseparable compan- 
 ionship, their unutterable grief when parted, their boundless joy when 
 united, their heroic endurance for each other's sake of hardships, trials, 
 sufferings, even death itself. With either of these two beliefs, it is easy 
 to understand how it happens, that of the thousands and tens of thous- 
 ands of men and women, often of different temperaments, of different 
 training and culture, of different tastes and ambitions, that annually unite 
 themselves for life, such vast numbers of them prove happy unions, make 
 well-mated husbands and wives, are lovingly faithful and helpfully 
 devoted to each other, tread hand in hand and heart with heart their 
 common path of life, hold no thought apart, divine each other's wish 'ere 
 yet expressed, study each others best interest, regard the home they found 
 as their sanctuar}-, the centre of their world, their Paradise on earth, 
 writhe under each other's agony, rejoice in each other's triumph, remain 
 true to each other to the brink of the grave, aye, even beyond it. 
 
 Even if these beliefs be only poetic conceptions of foreign lands and 
 ancient times, in these days of prosaic opinions of the marital institu- 
 tion, it is refreshing to go back to times, and to mingle 
 
 A pleasing 
 with people, thafhave not yet stripped all romance and change from the 
 
 all sanctity from the sweetest and holiest of all the rela- a'paihire riage 
 tionships of life. As the panting and weary wanderer 
 cherishes the reviving draught and the restful nook, as the sorrowing 
 and despairing soul cherishes the slightest word of comfort and of hope, 
 as the mother's soothing words calm her frightened babe, so comforting 
 and encouraging it is to us in these days of marriage-profanation to read 
 or hear of the Hindoos' or Jews' ennobling belief in the deathlessness and 
 divineness of the marital state. Ever since it has become fashionable 
 almost for every schoolboy and schoolgirl to ask, and to discuss, the ques- 
 tion: "Is Marriage a Failure?" ever since it has become a profitable 
 journalistic and theatrical feature to flaunt in the public's face all man- 
 ners of matrimonial delinquencies, ever since every frivolous and con- 
 temptuous fling at the expense of marriage passes for wit, ever since the
 
 frequency of divorces and the ease wherewith they are secured, the num- 
 bers of desertions, and f unhappy and ill-mated pairs, have become 
 topics of our daily conversations, there are few things that the masses 
 believe with firmer faith than that marriage, far from being a predestined 
 decree, is a lottery, that men and women marry as chance happens to 
 throw them together, somewhat as the Roman matron's plan in the Mid- 
 rashic story, that marriage, far from being a divine institution, is, as 
 modern realistic writers are portraying it, almt>st anything but a holy 
 relationship, and, according to Tolstoi, even contrary to the will of God. 
 
 Such croakers must remind us of that simpleton, who could not see 
 the woods for all the trees, or of that fish that longed to have a look of 
 water though surrounded by it. They themselves perhaps 
 ^d a unhfiy bratld " live in happiest wedlock. They see themselves surrounded 
 by happy families, whose homes are sanctuaries and whose 
 presiding spirits are priests. They see thousands of young men and 
 young women meet, look deep into each others eyes, deeper still, into 
 each others hearts, and remain sweetly buried there for ever. They hear 
 their fervent vows at the marriage-altar. They see them walk peacefully 
 and helpfully their path of happy wedded life. They see them invite 
 their friends on the anniversaries of their wedding-day, that they may 
 celebrate with them the sweet remembrance of the day that blessed them 
 with each others faithful love and sincere trust and constant companion- 
 ship. All this their own eyes see and their own ears hear abundantly, 
 but because they know of the comparatively few whose married life is 
 unhappy, whose love is not faithful and whose companionship is not true, 
 whose matrimonial bark is ill-fated because it was launched ill-mated, 
 who waited not for Love, the Divine Messenger froon above, to unite them 
 with the one their reasoning heart would have recognized intuitively as 
 the divinely destined, but permitted sordid interest, base convenience, 
 self-seeking matchmakers, to patch up a compact, and to wreck their lives, 
 they straightway brand the whole institution of marriage as frivolous, as 
 unholy, and, according to Tolstoi, as unprofitable, as deserving immedi- 
 ate abolition. 
 
 Fancy an inhabitant of one of our sister planets paying us a visit of 
 but a few hours duration. Fancy him spending a portion of that time in 
 a Dime Museum, another portion in a Hospital, another 
 by th^ a few j " dged in a Saloon, another in a Police Court, another in White- 
 chapel district, where he perceived only deformity, dis- 
 ease, drunkenness, brutality, misery, filth. Fancy yourselves reading the 
 report he gave of us upon his return. You would fling it aside in disgust, 
 as a gross slander of the earth's people. You would denounce him either 
 as a malicious perverter of the truth, or as a fool, for making his excep- 
 tional observations and experiences stand for the universal traits of all 
 the people of the earth. Such is the course pursued by many of our 
 pessimistic essayists and novelists. They happen to come across isolated 
 cases of unhappy marriages, or to chance into a Divorce-Court, or to read 
 in sensational papers pitiable stories of conjugal infelicities, or to witness
 
 -stage-representations of the low and vulgar reasons for which people 
 enter into marriage and step out of it, and forgetting that it is the excep- 
 tion that confronts them, that newspapers and theatres make exceptions 
 their most prominent and most profitable feature, knowing that the excep- 
 tional, the novel, the sensational, have a strong fascination for the masses, 
 that to deal with the general rule, to depict faithful husbands, devoted 
 wives, happy homes, would mean financial disaster, for almost everybody 
 can see that at home, in his neighbor's house, in the society in which he 
 moves, without reading about it in the newspapers, without the trouble 
 and expense to see it on the stage, forgetting this,. they treat the compara- 
 tively few unhappy marriages as if they were the general rule. 
 
 Count Tolstoi has given us a striking illustration of such perversion 
 of truth in a recent novel of his. I mention him, because he is the most 
 honorable of his school of writers. He writes not for 
 sensation or for profit. He is in earnest, and he sincerely rfage^advocated! 
 believes and means what he writes and says. But, to be 
 just, as well as charitable, the best we can say of him is that he is a delu- 
 ded old man, who has forgotten the romance and poetry of youth, and 
 the charm and power of early love. He is like that simpleton and fish 
 that I spoke of before. He himself lives in happy wedded life. He 
 associates with friends who are as happily married as he. He is sur- 
 rounded by homes in which peace and sanctity, joy and harmony have 
 uninterrupted sway. But he also knows a few isolated couples of which 
 the husbands are characterless, and the wives heartless, and whose matri- 
 monial bark naturally strand on the shoals of sin and crime, and he raises 
 a loud hue and cry against the baseness of the marital relation, and clamors 
 for its abolition. Behind him there is a school of realistic writers and 
 speakers that vociferously echo his clamors. And their din and noise 
 fairly drown the calm and truthful and dignified stories that are told by 
 the world's best men and women, of the blessings of marriage, of the 
 sanctity of the home, of its ennobling influence on the individual and 
 society, how without the home many of our brightest stars would never 
 have illumined our sphere, and many of our greatest blessings would 
 never have been ours 
 
 Mr. Samuel Smiles has collected in his book "Character" a number 
 of interesting and touching letters and excerpts from autobiographies of 
 celebrated men and women, that strongly confirm my 
 position, and from which, with your permission, I shall maritafbles S sing.s 
 read a few selections: 
 
 "Many external circumstances of happiness," DeTocqueville wrote, " have been 
 granted to me. But more than all, I have to thauk Heaven for having bestowed on me 
 
 true domestic happiness, the first of human blessings Of all the blessings 
 
 which God has given to me, the greatest of all, in my eyes, is to have lighted on Marie. 
 You cannot imagine what she is. in great trials. Usually so gentle, she then becomes 
 strong and energetic. She watches me without my knowing it; she softens, calms, and 
 strengthens me in difficulties which disturb me but leave her serene. ... I cannot 
 describe to you the happiness yielded in the long run by the habitual society of a woman 
 in whose soul all that is good in your own is reflected naturally, and even improved. 
 When I say or do a thing which seems to me to be perfectly right, I read immediately 
 in Marie's countenance an expression of proud satisfaction which elevates me. And so,
 
 when my conscience reproaches me, her face instantly clouds over. Although I have 
 great power over her mind, I see with pleasure that she awes me, and so long as I love 
 Her as I do now, I am sure that I shall never allow myself to tie drawn into anything 
 that is wrong." 
 
 " Man longs for a happiness " wrote M. Guizot, whose turbulent life was sustained 
 by a noble wife, "more complete and more tender than which all the labors and 
 triumphs of active exertion and public importance can bestow. What I know to-day, 
 at the end of my race, I have felt when it began, and during its continuance. Even in 
 the midst of great undertakings, domestic affections form the basis of life; and the 
 most brilliant career has only superficial and incomplete enjoyments, if a stranger to 
 the happy ties of family and friendship." 
 
 " Twenty-four years experience has shown me," wrote Count Zinzendorf of his 
 wife, " that just the helpmate whom I have is the only one that could suit my vocation. 
 Who else could have so carried through my family affairs ? Who lived so spotlessly 
 before the world ? . . . Who would, like she, without a murmur have seen her hus- 
 band encounter such dangers by land and sea ? who undertaken with him, and sus- 
 tained, such astonishing pilgrimages ? Who, amidst such difficulties, could have held 
 up her head and supported me?" 
 
 Edmund Burke said of his home: " Every care vanishes the moment I enter under 
 my own roof." 
 
 John Stuart Mill dedicated his treatise "On Liberty" to his wife in these touching 
 words: " To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part 
 the author, of all that is best in my writings the friend and wife, whose exalted sense 
 of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief 
 reward, I dedicate this volume." 
 
 IvUther, speaking of his wife said: ' I would not exchange my poverty with her for 
 all the riches of Croesus without her. . . . The utmost blessing that God can confer 
 on a man is the possession of a good and a pious wife with whom he may live in peace 
 and tranquility." 
 
 The following is the epitaph Carlyle inscribed upon the tombstone of his wife: " 111 
 her bright existence she had more sorrows than are common, but also a soft amiability, 
 a capacity of discernment, and a noble loyalty of heart, which are rare. For forty years 
 she was the true and loving helpmate of her husband, and by act and word unweariedly 
 forwarded him as none else could in all of worthy that he did or attempted."* 
 
 Time will not permit me to continue these extracts, or to dwell upon 
 the encouragement and help other great men received from their wives, 
 such as the brave Dr. Livingstone during his travels in South Africa, or 
 the blind naturalist Huber, or the philosopher William Hamilton, or the 
 scientist Faraday, or the jurist Grotius, and a host of others. Neither 
 will it permit me to quote extracts from letters and biographies of women 
 in which they tell of their domestic happiness, how marriage ennobled 
 their being, gave a holy mission to their life, how a babe's soft accents, 
 a husband's tender words of love and cheer, allayed every fear, banished 
 every evil thought, conjured Paradise from heaven into their heart, and 
 spread its glory over all the domain over which they held sway. 
 
 But why need more be said, why need anything at all be said, in 
 vindication of the Marital Institution, or in opposition to the senseless 
 
 clamor for its abolition? They who would abolish it 
 To abolish , , , , 
 
 Marriage must permanently would first have to undo some thousands 
 
 Nature first" 3 " of vears of civilization, would then have to change 
 
 human nature, would then have to annul God's decree, 
 
 and their thwarted efforts, after they had proceeded but a little way, 
 
 would soon teach them of the folly of their attempt. Whether we 
 
 Smiles, Character, Chap. XI.
 
 believe or not that the two souls, that mysteriously and irresistibly feel 
 themselves drawn towards the marriage altar, lived united in happy 
 wedlock in a preceding life, or that the two hearts, which pure love 
 inseparably welds into one, were divinely predestined for each other, 
 this we must believe that the union of two hearts and souls of opposite 
 sex in Holy Wedlock is a Law of Nature, a Decree of God. 
 
 It is a mistake to believe that it is the option of man or woman to 
 marry or not. If it were, few men and women would voluntarily take 
 upon themselves the cares and burdens, the trials and sufferings, that 
 marriage, with all its happiness, involves. A few may rebel. The masses 
 must marry. Nature is determined that the human species shall con- 
 tinue, and shall gradually develop into the god-like, and for that end it 
 needs, it must have, and it will have, the Institution of Marriage. It 
 knows no better means and no better training-school than it. In that, 
 sacred relationship the root of civilization lies imbedded. It is the foun- 
 tain from which all our virtues spring. It is there where husband and 
 wife learn the lesson of mutual dependence and mutual helpfulness, 
 consideration for each other's feelings, respect for each others rights, 
 endurance of hardships and trials for each others sake. It is there where 
 the altruistic instincts acquire ascendancy over the egoistic, and the 
 passions subject themselves to the control of reason. There parents 
 learn and practice the lesson of self-sacrifice, forethought, industry, 
 domesticity. There children learn and practice obedience, gratitude, 
 love, reverence. There both learn to give to society that support and 
 obedience that shall enable it to promote the highest good of all, and to 
 protect the sanctity of each home. That a relationship from which so 
 much of public and private blessings flow, that is so powerful a civilizer, 
 that holds within its grasp almost the only blessings that make life worth 
 living: the purest love, the sincerest appreciation, the most devoted com- 
 panionship, the most heroic self-sacrifice, the highest happiness, should 
 not bear the impress of divine coinage is difficult for the thoughtful to 
 believe. To be asked to believe, as Count Tolstoi would have us, that 
 the marital relationship degrades the human being into a sensuous beast, 
 and should, therefore, be abolished, is an insult to those blessed beings 
 whom we name parents, children, husband, wife, is an insult to that 
 sacred home that was our first school of love, of virtue, our first and 
 sweetest fount of happiness. 
 
 With some of you, who have observed some phases of the marital 
 state in the upper and in the lower strata of society, the sophistry of the 
 
 realistic school of writers may have considerable weight. 
 
 ,. ,, c ,. . . . . Abuse 110 argu- 
 
 L liable to discover the stamp of divine coinage in marn- meat of useless- 
 ages that are scandalized by corruptions and brutalities, r 
 you may be of the opinion that: if such marriages have been made any- 
 where outside our sphere, it must have been in the lowest hell, if such a 
 place there be. But let me caution you again : Beware of false generali- 
 zations; make not of the exception a general rule. There have been 
 theologians many whose lives have been unholy; religion nevertheless
 
 continued a holy and a blessed institution. Children have been brutal 
 to parents, and parents cruel to children; the parental and filial relation- 
 ships have nevertheless continued sweet and ennobling to this day. 
 Husbands and wives may be false to each other, and homes may be 
 cursed; marriage will nevertheless continue a Divine Institution, and 
 homes bits of heaven strewn all over our earth. Where such unhappy 
 couples you see, remember that God never was their match-maker, 
 neither was their marriage contract signed in Heaven. Cupid never 
 aimed his dart of love at them; it was the demon of discord who shot 
 his arrow, barbed with unholy desires, into their hearts, and poisoned 
 them forever. 
 
 There are those, who would not wait for their God-sent mate, whose 
 coming, their hearts, if pure, _ would unerringly have divined, and they 
 married in haste only to repent in leisure. Th^re are 
 happy n mar r ri"ges those . who passed by the one that Heaven sent to bless, 
 their lives and to sanctify their homes, and linked them- 
 selves to greater purse or to greater physical beauty, or to the bubble of 
 a greater name, only to find the greater prove the worse. 
 
 But a little time sufficed to convince them that infatuation is not love,, 
 and that calculating shrewdness does not secure marital bliss. 
 
 Wealth may have filled their houses with elegance, and prospered, 
 them in a worldly way. But it starved their hearts and left their mansions 
 poor in that domestic happiness that makes the humblest cottage rich. 
 It afforded abundant idleness, and ample means for gratifying every wish 
 within reach, and the idler their hands the busier their feet in running, 
 and the more plenteous their means to gratify cravings, the greater 
 their indulgences and excesses, their revels and riots, their forgetfulness 
 of marital duties and marital vows. 
 
 Beauty may have exercised a powerful attraction, and aroused admi- 
 ration everywhere. But it turned their heads, and made them slaves to. 
 vanity and flattery, made them sacrifice modesty to display, and domes- 
 ticity to public exhibition, encouraged rivalries, awakened jealousies, 
 aroused suspicions, and extinguished the flame that once burnt within 
 them and for each other, and darkened the home forever. 
 
 Disparity in station, in breeding, in disposition, may have lent 
 piquancy at first, but the novelty wore off, and they found, to their infinite 
 grief that they were married but not mated. Companionship between 1 
 them became formal. Home became intolerable to them. They sought 
 elsewhere the pleasures and diversions they could, not find at home. 
 Disrespect and hatred lodged themselves within their hearts, and strife 
 and cruelty within the home. Peace and happiness took wing, and left 
 broken hearts and desecrated homes behind. 
 
 But they that embark on the matrimonial sea with a commission from 
 
 on high encounter no such dangers. With flying colors, and amidst 
 
 cheers and blessings, they sail fearlessly forth, with goal 
 
 properly fitted clearly fixed, with helm firm in hand, with love-filled 
 
 matrimomal . sa -j s to S p ee( j them on, with compass in their hearts so 
 
 delicately poised as to indicate the. slightest deviation.
 
 from their path, and to set them instantly aright. The winds may howl, 
 the waves may lash, with experience-attested charts before them, with 
 watchful eyes and with courageous hand to guide, their well-constructed 
 bark fears not those shoals and rocks on which many an ill-guided craft 
 has stranded. To the last captain and mate remain conscious of the 
 sacrifices each has made for the other, in undertaking together the 
 hazardous journey of wedded life, and of the responsibilities they owe to 
 that little crew they, one by one, take aboard. To the last each shares 
 the others cares, each strives to lessen the others burden and to increase 
 the others joys. To the last there is not a moment's shrinking from duty 
 or relaxation of watchfulness. To the last both bestow the utmost care 
 and attention upon their little crew, that they, in their turn, may one 
 day safely guide noble craft's on life's varied seas. On whatever bark 
 such captain, mate, and crew you see, in whatever home such husband, 
 wife, and children you find: 
 
 "If there is happiness below, 
 In such a home she's shrined; 
 The human heart can never know 
 Enjoyment more refined, 
 Than where the sacred band is twined 
 Of filial and parental ties, 
 That tender union all combined 
 Of Nature's holiest sympathies." 
 
 Fitzarthur.
 
 The Noblest Title: An " Honest Man.' 
 
 RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 Philadelphia, April wlh, 1892. 
 
 (Exod. xx. 15.) 
 (Deut. xxvii. 17.) in;'l Vl^J J 
 
 (Prov. xi. 26.) DIN"? irop' "O J'JO 
 (Psalms cxvi. n.) 373 D1XH ^D 'I3H3 TOOK 'JX 
 
 " I hope I shall always possess firmness enough to maintain, what I consider the 
 most enviable of all titles, the character of an " Honest Man." George Washington. 
 
 When on such a collection of Biblical citations as the above I ponder, 
 I cannot but think of yet another Scriptural passage, the one the wise 
 Koheleth wrote, "The thing that hath been, it is that 
 which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall S^g* y f 
 be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there 
 anything whereof it may be said: See, this is new?"* There may be 
 little comfort in such an array of crushing testimony against the honesty 
 of people of the hoary past, yet it assures us that dishonesty is not an 
 invention of our own. The earliest lawgiver had found it necessary to put 
 the thief into the pillory of his Ten Commandments, where he has remained 
 on public exhibition to this day. Robbing the poor, amassing lands and 
 properties by fraudulent means, "cornering" markets, were, as passages 
 such as the above indicate, familiar crimes in ancient times, and the 
 Psalmist of old went so far as to declare that " every man is a deceiver." 
 
 Such a characterization of one of the most advanced peoples of the 
 past, and by a Biblical writer, would speak volumes for the depravity of 
 
 human nature, were it not for the writer's own implied 
 
 . * , i i , i . Its universality, 
 
 confession that he had indulged in an exaggeration, that , 
 
 it was a hasty statement, made at a time when he was under great afflic- 
 tion. This confession explains a similar characterization of another highly 
 cultured people, found in the writings of a more recent distinguished 
 author in Shakespeare's Hamlet. He makes the hero of his fancy say 
 that "to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten 
 thousand," and to give to his friend's news that " the world's grown hon- 
 est," the reply "Then is doomsday near." Hamlet, too, was laboring 
 under great mental affliction, was in a melancholy mood, knew of base 
 
 * Eccl. i, 9-10.
 
 falsities and strongly suspected more, and so it was quite natural for one 
 in such a state of mind to indulge in gloomy exaggerations, to believe no 
 more than one man out of ten thousand honest, and to expect the dawn 
 of doomsday sooner than seeing the world growing honest. 
 
 But not so easy of explanation is a still more recent statement by 
 another distinguished writer, M. Renan, in his new volume of "Souve- 
 nirs. ' ' This scholarly author, in all seriousness, questions 
 Honesty held to 
 
 be an improfit- whether in our present state honesty is at all possible or 
 able investment. eyen pro fi ta bi e) to quo te his own words: " If it were quite 
 clear that virtue was a paying investment, men of business who are very 
 sagacious, would long since have noted the fact and become virtuous. 
 We know that virtue is a bad investment in this present finite state of 
 things,"* or, in other words, that honesty, at present, is not the best 
 policy, and that the average man, to further his own interests, must be, 
 or chooses to be dishonest. I had scarcely gotten over my astonishment 
 at so extravagant a statement by one, whom a long experience as author 
 ought to have taught the necessity of carefully weighing each word before 
 giving it to the public, when my attention was drawn to two items of 
 news, one contained in a recent New York letter to the Philadelphia 
 Public Ledger, and reading as follows. 
 
 "The average man is dishonest," said a prominent New York merchant to your 
 correspondent to-day. The merchant is a member of the Chamber of Commerce and 
 Hoard of Trade and the President of another commercial association. " I do not mean 
 to say," he added, " that every man is dishonest, far from it, but I do say that the 
 average man, and the average woman, for that matter, will steal if he or she gets a 
 chance, and I base this opinion upon my own experience and observation in business. 
 During the past ten years thirty-six of my own employes have stolen from me in 
 amounts ranging from a few dollars to $5000. A recent case was that of a $35 a week 
 clerk who defaulted for less than a thousand dollars. Thirty-six discovered cases of 
 theft among my own employes in ten years." 
 
 and the other stating that a journal a short time ago had offered a school 
 prize for the best essay on "Honesty." Of the twenty-three responses 
 received a large proportion proved to have been stolen, and one, a poem, 
 was stolen entire. And when to such facts as these we add the late dis- 
 closures of official corruption in New York, in Chicago, in our own City, 
 and elsewhere, that proved the guilt of dishone'sty on men that were 
 trusted and honored by their Communities, that held distinguished offices- 
 in religious and charitable and social organizations, when we think of the 
 Canadian Colony of United States ex-Aldermen, ex-Bank officials, ex- 
 Superintendents of Sunday Schools, ex-Deacons of Churches, it seems 
 almost impossible not to agree with the Psalmist of old that all men are 
 deceivers, or with Shakespeare that among ten thousand men possibly 
 one honest man may be found, that we shall sooner behold doomsday 
 than an honest world, or with Renan that virtue must be a bad invest- 
 ment in this present finite state, or with the prominent New York mer- 
 chant that the average man will steal if he gets a chance. 
 
 Were this, however, to be our final verdict we would be guilty our- 
 
 * Eel. Magaz. April, '92, page 500.
 
 selves of that very exaggeration which we reprove in others. It is un- 
 doubtedly true that men and women have been dishonest 
 ever since we have any knowledge of them. Equally no t e jishotrest nan 
 true it is that fraud and robbery still flourish before our 
 very doors. But the sweeping charge that the average man is dishonest, 
 or would be so if he had a chance, is, in my opinion, not true. The term 
 "average man " includes the whole of rational and responsible society, 
 and I have too firm a faith in the sway of morality over humanity, to 
 believe every sane member of it guilty of, or temptable to, dishonesty. 
 Thousands of years of civilization, of education, of religious teaching, of 
 social intercourse, of necessitated bridling of the greeds and appetites, 
 have stamped the lesson that honesty is the best policy, more, is a right 
 per se, too deep in human nature to permit dishonesty to become the 
 controlling vice of man. It is unfortunately true the lesson has been a 
 difficult one to learn, and many have proven themselves poor pupils, 
 some even hopeless cases. But why overlook the many, who have mas- 
 tered their task, and daily repeat it without a flaw, whom neither obstacle 
 nor temptation will confuse or lead astray ? 
 
 Honesty has not yet become such a rarity as to necessitate our visit- 
 ing some ancient museum to see a specimen of it. It flourishes at our 
 doors. It looks into our windows. It runs against us on 
 our streets. It counts its devotees among the young and 
 among the old, among the high and among the low. 
 There is probably not one among you who has not beautiful stories to tell 
 of pleasing encounters with it. Only this very morning on my way here 
 I observed, as I had frequently done before, different newspapers dis- 
 played for sale on the doorsteps of a house, with a number of coins 
 scattered over them, without a salesman in sight. I saw a man approach 
 the unguarded improvised newspaper stand, pick out the paper he wanted, 
 deposit the price for it, and go his way, without any one present to satisfy 
 himself of the honesty of the transaction. An insignificant affair though 
 it was, to me it proved that the owner of these papers showed by his absence 
 that he did not believe in the dishonesty of the average man, while the 
 man who selected his paper and deposited the price of it alongside the 
 other coins, without as much as looking for the salesman, convinced 
 me that there are some who will not steal even though they have the 
 chance. 
 
 I remember asking once for a name or date, I do not now recollect 
 which, in one of my classes, to which the answer was rather slow in forth- 
 coming. At length the answer, or what I understood to be the right 
 answer, was given me by one of the boys, which I acknowledged with a 
 few words of praise. When I had written the answer on the board to 
 impress it the better on the other pupils, the boy that had, as I believed, 
 given it rose to say, that the answer on the board was not what he had 
 said, and that he was therefore not entitled to the praise he had received. 
 Here we have another illustration that chance, and even the safest, will 
 not always tempt to dishonesty.
 
 It was the Rev. Robert Collyer, I believe, who told us the touching 
 story, how he was one very cold evening approached in an Edinburgh 
 hotel by a little boy, with a pinched face, his bare feet frozen, his body but 
 scantily covered with rags, and asked: "Please, sir, buy some matches." 
 Mr. Collyer did not want any. " But they are only a penny a box," said 
 the shivering little fellow. The cheapness had no temptation for the 
 Reverend gentleman. "You may have two boxes for a penny " begged 
 the little piece of starved humanity. Mr. Collyer had no change, and 
 promised to buy some other time. "Oh, do buy them to-night," the 
 boy pleaded, " I will run and get you the change, for I'm very hungry." 
 Unable to resist any longer, the clergyman gave him a shilling, never 
 expecting to see the boy again. For a few hours his expectation proved 
 true. But late in the evening a still smaller and still more wretched 
 looking boy rushed into the hotel, up to a group of gentlemen, and 
 breathlessly asked: " Be any of ye's the gentleman that bought matches 
 from brother Sandie." Mr. Collyer told him he was the man. " Here, 
 sir, is fourpence out o'yer shilling. Sandie cannot come; he's very ill; 
 a cab ran over him and knocked him down, and he lost his cap and his 
 matches, and your sevenpence, and both his legs are broken, and the 
 doctor says he'll die, and that's a'," and then putting the fourpence on 
 the table, the poor child burst out in tears, and brought tears into the 
 eyes of his listeners. Mr. Collyer accompanied the boy to his miserable 
 lodging in the slums of Edinburgh, where he found the story only too 
 true. Both their parents were dead. There was neither food nor warmth 
 in the room, temptation enough to be dishonest, and yet the dying boy's 
 only thought in all his agony was to have the change brought back all 
 that was left of it to the gentleman, and he could not be pacified till 
 his wee little brother had started to take it back, and to explain the delay 
 and the shortage of the change. A pleased expression stole over his 
 pallid face when he saw Mr. Collyer enter the miserable hole. Faintly 
 he apologized for not coming back 'with the change, begged him not to 
 think him dishonest, commended his little brother Reuby to his care 
 and breathed his last. Here was extreme poverty, slum-environment, 
 inexperienced youth, favoring opportunity, fatal accident, mighty temp- 
 tations to dishonesty, and yet even here human character proved that it 
 is not wholly depraved. 
 
 Let us look at this question from yet another point of view. During 
 the recent Franco-Prussian war, as Dr. Neale informs us, a cavalry Captain 
 called a French peasant, who was working in the field, to his side, and 
 commanded him to take him and his troop to a good barley-field, where 
 the horses could be fed. The peasant, obliged to obey, led them some 
 way, till at length he brought them to what they wanted. "These will 
 do very well," said the Captain. " Nay, follow me a little further still," 
 said the guide, ' ' and I will show you one that will do better. ' '. Soon 
 they reached another barley-field. "This does not seem to be as good a 
 field," said the Captain, somewhat surprised, "as that which you led us 
 past." " No, " said the peasant, "but this is mine." Was this perhaps
 
 ; another instance of the average man's dishonesty or of his yielding to it 
 under favoring chances ? Here was a simple peasant, forced to show a 
 barley-field to an enemy for depredation, passing by one that satisfied the 
 enemy even better, and leading them into his own field, believing it in 
 his heart to be dishonest to surrender another man's field to the foe, and 
 save his own. 
 
 Let us hear another story, one that.Paxton Hood tells, that will help 
 to make our argument stronger still. The scene of this narrative is laid 
 in the Alpine region of Switzerland, and the principal characters are two 
 humble peasants, named Franz and Gaspard. " My friend," said Franz 
 one day to Gaspard, who was mowing his field, "the time is come to 
 clear the hay from the meadow. You know there is a dispute about the 
 meadow whether it belongs to you or me. The judges meet at Salenche 
 to-morrow, and they want us to appear before them to state our case." 
 " You see, Franz," answered Gaspard, " that I have cut the grass; it is, 
 therefore absolutely necessary that I should get it up to-morrow; I can- 
 not leave it." "And I cannot send away the judges, who have chosen 
 the day themselves. Besides, we must know to whom the meadow belongs 
 before it is cleared." They debated some time. At length Gaspard said 
 to Franz: "Go to Salenche, tell the judges my reasons as well as your 
 own for claiming the meadow, and then I need not go myself." So it was 
 agreed. Franz pleaded both for and against himself, and, to the best of 
 his power presented his own and Gaspard 's claims. When the judges 
 had pronounced their sentence he returned to his friend saying: "The 
 meadow is thine; the judgment is in thy favor, and I wish you joy." 
 What better chance can anyone have to further his own cause at the 
 expense of another than Franz had ? What better evidence can we have that 
 there are men whose honesty is beyond all temptation of gain ? What 
 better proof that not everybody has arrived at that pessimistic state in 
 which every man is believed to be dishonest than the confidence which 
 Gaspard reposed in Franz ? 
 
 It may be objected that in the examples that I have given the temp- 
 tations weremere trifles, and that the heroes were mere children who had 
 not yet gotten beyond the influence of Sunday Schools and Nursery Tales, 
 and who had not yet the courage to be dishonest, or simple rustics too 
 far removed from the centres of civilization to be contaminated by the 
 corruptions of trade, and by the extravagances of society. As far as the 
 trifling temptations are concerned, your own schoolday recollections will 
 bear me out that a teacher's public recognition of merit is not a trifle to 
 a pupil; and to boys selling papers or matches for a living the brown 
 coppers are as much of a treasure as the yellow guineas and eagles are to 
 the merchant princes, and a barley-field or a meadow is as much of a 
 fortune to a French or Swiss peasant as a Western ranch is to a Duke. 
 And as to saddling dishonesty on the cities, especially on their wealthier 
 people, we need but recall the money-transaction between the founder of 
 ; the House of Rothschild and the prince of Hesse Cassel to be assured that 
 men may live in cities and engage in trades, and be wealthy, and have
 
 the best chances for greatly increasing- their wealth by dishonest means, 
 and yet maintain a spotless honesty. During the French War the prince 
 of Hesse Cassel, fleeing through -Frankfort with a large treasure in his 
 possession, left it with Rothschild, to be used as seemed best to the banker, 
 with little hope of ever seeing it again, knowing that the enemy might 
 anyday enter Frankfort and rob the banker of all his possessions. A part 
 of his fear came true. The French army entered Frankfort, plundered 
 the city, robbed Rothschild of all but the prince's treasure, which was 
 buried in his garden. This he dug up, and used in trade, and when the 
 times of peace returned he restored the money and the jewels to the 
 prince, though he had lost his own. The prince in gratitude recom- 
 mended the honest banker to various sovereigns, and thus helped to build 
 up the name and fortune of the famous Banking House. Here was cer- 
 tainly chance enough for dishonesty. Herr Rothschild could easily have 
 given it out that the deposited treasure had been robbed together with 
 his own, and the prince would never have been the wiser. And should 
 it even be claimed that the banker's honesty was only a speculation, that 
 he counted on larger returns from his honesty than his dishonesty would 
 have yielded, even this would disprove Renan's belief that 'virtue is a bad 
 investment, that if honesty were the best policy sagacious business men 
 would long since have noted the fact, and become honest. ' 
 
 There is yet another objection to be met. Men may admit that the 
 Psalmist and M. Renan and the New York merchant indulged in exag 
 gerations when they credited every man, or the average 
 wide prevalence man with dishonesty, that the illustrations of honesty that 
 mitted " ^ ^ a< ^ given are true, and a thousand others like them, 
 
 and yet hold with Hamlet that "to be honest, as this 
 world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand," that the degrees 
 of dishonesty from highway robbery to the little harmless deceptions 
 are so many, and some of such delicate shading, that people are often 
 guilty of it without knowing, and in such large numbers as to make Pope's 
 celebrated line: 
 
 " An honesl man's the noblest work of God." 
 
 also true in paraphrase: 
 
 " An honest man's the rarest work of God." 
 
 It may be claimed that the prominence given to such stories, as I cited 
 above, in school, in church, on stage, in press, on platform, in conversa- 
 tion, indicates that honesty is an exceptional virtue, that the patent locks 
 and bolts and safes and burglar-alarms wherewith we protect our homes 
 and shops and offices, the precautionary contracts and notes and pledges 
 and signatures we ask and give often even from and to our nearest and 
 dearest, the fears we entertain, the suspicions we harbor, do not show a 
 very strong faith in human honesty; that the higher salaries we pay for, 
 and greater honors we show to, honest service, that the reward we offer 
 and pay to the restorer of a lost article, and the indignation we feel when 
 such a return is not sufficiently rewarded, shows but too plainly how rare 
 -and how marketable a virtue honesty is.
 
 That objection, we fear, is one that we shall not easily meet. It is; 
 unfortunately based on too much truth to encourage much of an attempt 
 at answering it. Explain away as much as we may, the fact remains that 
 dishonesty is perhaps the commonest, the most wide-spread sin of the 
 human family, that it infests every strata of society, that it is as much at- 
 home in the Courts of Justice, in the Halls of Legislation, in the School 
 and in the Church, as it is in the Public Marts. 
 
 It is not a frequent pulpit theme. Preachers are often too dishonest 
 themselves to aim their eloquence at the dishonest. It is there where 
 Kenan's doctrine of the unprofitableness of honesty has 
 considerable force. Honest speaking might injure the ^^^f here> 
 preacher's salary, might endanger his re-election, might 
 bring coolness between himself and his influential supporters. There 
 was a plantation preacher during the days of slavery, who wielded con- 
 siderable influence over his little flock of slaves. One day the slave 
 master said to him: " Pompey I hear you are a great preacher." " Yes, 
 massa, de Lord do help me powerful sometimes." " Well. Pompey, don't 
 you think the negroes steal little things on the plantation ?" " I'se mighty 
 'fraid they does, massa." "Then, Pompey, I want you to preach a ser- 
 mon to the negroes against stealing." After a brief reflection, Pompey 
 replied, " You see, massa dat wouldn't never do, 'cause 'twould trow such 
 a col'ness over de meetin'." Other and more cultured preachers are 
 equally afraid that preaching against the transgression of the Eighth 
 Commandment is apt to seriously damage their popularity, and to throw 
 a coolness over their relationship with those, whose toes might be stepped 
 upon. 
 
 Such pulpit dishonesty, such fear of honestly preaching the honest 
 truth to dishonest people, may be not a little responsible that fraud and 
 knavery and deception are still perhaps the commonest 
 and most wide-spread of all our sins. Among the other gxistenc^ C 
 reasons that Law of Nature that enforces a Struggle for 
 Existence stands foremost. The necessities of life are not equally divided. 
 Some have much, others little, others must engage in a keen struggle to 
 have any at all. Cold and hunger are painful, and to those that have to 
 suffer them the abundance of the rich is mightily tempting. And since 
 man's evolution from the lower species, among which the instinct of the 
 inviolability of proprietary right is wholly wanting, is but of a compara- 
 tively recent date, and since in lower animal life the mode of maintaining 
 existence is, excepting the domestic animals, wholly by means of brute- 
 force, thievery, cunning, it is not to be wondered that brutish men in 
 want should still employ the methods of brutes to keep alive. 
 
 As another reason for the frequency of frauds and deceptions we may 
 mention that other Law of Nature, that enforces the Surrii'al of the Fittest* 
 The fittest, however, as in the commercial world, for in- 
 stance, is not always the most virtuous. Here, too, Renan's ^ Fittest 1 *" 
 belief that "virtue is a bad investment in this present finite 
 state of things" applies with considerable directness. Honest men with
 
 honest methods are forced to compete with dishonest men and dishonest 
 methods for the patronage of people, who are largely guided by appear- 
 ance or price or talk, and lower price and poorer quality and oily talk 
 win where honest goods and honest prices and honest representation 
 often fail. To have an equal chance for surviving, such would-be-honest 
 men are much inclined to look upon themselves as martyrs, but not to' 
 the extent of sacrificing loss rather than integrity. They think themselves 
 justified to falsify goods, to misrepresent, to steal from their laborers'' 
 wages, as their competitors do, to have an equal chance for proving them- 
 selves the Survival of the Fittest. 
 
 As another reason we might mention the manifold advantages that 
 wealth enjoys, and the corresponding degradation and misery of poverty. 
 "In this present finite state of things" labor has little 
 WeaUh antage f for its toil > money has it all. The purse is mightier than 
 the square and compass, mightier than the pen. The 
 rich man has a world at his feet; the poor man has a world at his throat. 
 All honors, all doors, all hearts, all pleasures, fly open before the one; 
 and close before the other. The handsome mansion of the one faces the 
 beautiful avenue; the miserable tenement of the other stands in the filth- 
 reeking alley or by-street. The table of the one groans under the weight 
 of the choicest viands; the other groans because of the emptiness of his 
 table. IvUxuriant equipages convey the one; the other must trudge with 
 weary foot his distant way. To escape the summer's heat, the one hastens 
 to the seaside, or to the mountain top, or to his country residence, and 
 to escape the winter's cold he betakes himself to a warmer climate;' the 
 other must swelter at his toil when the sun burns hottest, and shiver 
 when the storm blows coldest. Discontent roots itself in the heart of the 
 latter. It developes a false line of reasoning. He believes that all men 
 have an equal right to all wealth, that the taking from the rich the super- 
 fluities of wealth is an act as salutary as the leech's drawing blood from 
 a full-blooded patient, that his wealth was easily acquired, and that it is, 
 therefore, no wrong to help oneself to a part of it. 
 
 As another reason for the prevalence of dishonesty we might mention 
 our tolerance of high-toned fraud. We bestow the title of genius on 
 those sharpers who know the art of swindling the people 
 h?gh > -to r ifedfraud out of millions of dollars. We honor as our aristocracy 
 the "Bears" and "Bulls" of our Stock Exchange, that 
 lower or raise the value of stocks as best profits their own pockets and 
 empties those of others. We hail as benefactors the organizers of mono- 
 polies, trusts and combines, who wreck fortunes and lives, raise prices, 
 lower wages, impoverish the many to enrich the few. We feel ourselves 
 honored to be noted by "stock-gamblers," " stock-waterers, " by those 
 who " corner " the markets, bankrupt the nations and plunder the people. 
 We invest with high offices the henchmen of legislation-needing corpora- 
 tions, political bosses, who deal in voters as drovers deal in cattle, and 
 whose services, pledged to the people, are ever at the command of the 
 highest bidder. With such high-toned fraud as model, we cannot be.-
 
 surprised at the abundance of low-toned thievery in the lower strata. With 
 such honors heaped upon the big sharks, we cannot be surprised that the 
 small fry should be tempted into the high art of spoliation to be some- 
 bodies, too, believing with Weber: "Man muss heutzutage betriigen, 
 wenn man ein ehrlicher Mann sein will," we cannot be surprised that 
 there should be such a wide-spread belief that to be successful the best 
 
 mode to pursue is 
 
 " the simple plan 
 
 That they should take who have the power 
 And they should keep who can" 
 
 and that the captured common criminals should ever seek to palliate 
 their offense by claiming that they have done only in another form what 
 the rich are doing daily unpunished, that there is Law for the rich but 
 not for the poor, that for the private thief there is the prison, for the 
 public thief there are honors and offices, for the slayer of one: the top of 
 the scaffold, for the slayer of the thousands: the top of the ladder. 
 
 As another reason why dishonesty is so common and so wide-spread 
 we may mention certain false standards of morals that are winked at, 
 even sanctioned, by respectable people. Men often parade 
 as economy, as sagacious dealing, as sharp manoeuvering, ards oFmoralV 
 what is downright fraud and deception. . It would require 
 a more powerful magnifying glass than any that has yet been constructed 
 to discover a difference between thievery and certain sharp dealings prac- 
 ticed by people, who think themselves paragons of honesty. People 
 think nothing of squeezing their tax-rates till scarcely the rind is left 
 to the authorities, to elude the revenue-officer and to evade the payment 
 of duties, of rail-way fares, as if it were less criminal to defraud govern- 
 ments or corporations than individuals. People think nothing of adver- 
 tising wares and prices in style and language that are well-known to 
 themselves to be positive misrepresentations, as if it were less criminal 
 to steal money out of peoples' pockets in oneway than in another. People 
 think nothing of recommending to others employees whom they have 
 dismissed for unfitness, and friends whose abilities they know to be of 
 little value, as if tampering with a man's confidence were not as much 
 of a crime as tampering with his cash-drawer. People think nothing of 
 screwing their laborers' wages down to the starvation point, as if stealing 
 a man's labor were not as great a guilt as stealing its accumulated pro- 
 duct. They may call it " legitimate business, " " honest gain," or by some 
 other euphonious name as the Arab thieves call in their language, 
 their plunder: "gain " call it what they will, Lowell still is right: 
 
 " In vain we call old notions fudge 
 And bend our conscience to our dealing; 
 The Ten Commandments will not budge; 
 And stealing will continue stealing." 
 
 We must not misunderstand the last line of this stanza. Lowell does 
 not mean to say that man will always continue stealing, but that stealing,
 
 no matter in what form, will always be called stealing. 
 fuure f r the No > I d not think that f rau d and deception will always 
 
 be as common and as wide-spread as now. We have seen 
 that they are not as all-pervading as the Psalmist and Shakespeare and 
 Renan and the New York merchant would have us believe. I believe, 
 and I have proof for believing it, that there is less dishonesty now than 
 ever before. I believe there will be less of it in the future than now. I 
 have faith in the moral evolution of human kind. I believe the time is 
 fast drawing nigh when preachers will be less fearless to speak the honest 
 truth, and congregations less resentful at hearing it; when men will heed 
 more the counsels of the divine that is within them and less those of the 
 brute instincts that are not yet eliminated; when men will place integrity 
 above self-interest, and find it the most profitable as well as the most 
 honorable investment; " when plain living and high thinking" will re- 
 place extravagance and the resorting to dishonest means for its indul- 
 gence; when labor will equally share with wealth the advantages and 
 enjoyments of life; when character and not money will constitute the 
 universal standard of moral excellence; when the high-toned criminals 
 will be dealt with as the low-toned; when every man will echo the noble 
 sentiment Washington expressed: "I hope I shall always possess firmness 
 and virtue enough to maintain, what I consider the most enviable of all 
 .titles, the character of an " Honest Man."
 
 The Highest Fame: A "Good Name." 
 
 RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D. 
 Philadelphia, April i?th, 1892. 
 
 (Exod. xx; 16) iptf -\y 
 
 (Prov. xix; 5) npr 
 
 (Prov. xxv. 18) njy -\y 
 
 "There are three crowns: the Crown of Learning, the Crown of Priesthood, the 
 Crown of Royalty, but the Crown of a Good Name is greater than all." 
 (Talmud, A both iv; 13.) 
 
 " Man wants but little here below, 
 Nor wants that little long." 
 
 Goldsmith The Hermit. St. 8. 
 
 So the poet said, and experience confirms his saying. But experience 
 also confirms the addition some wag made to this stanza, that though 
 ' ' man wants but little here below ' ' he wants of that little 
 a great deal. Authorities on Dietetics tell us that about Llfe ce ^efess toil. 
 twenty-five ounces of plain and nutritious food is all that 
 an adult requires a day to keep mind and body in good health and in 
 vigorous activity, and that nature readily supplies that want with but a 
 little aid from man. The covering that man needs to protect himself 
 against the cold and heat, nature, too, amply provides, also requiring but 
 little of man's labor. Were man content with this, a few hours' toil a 
 day would suffice to secure for him all the necessaries for the mainte- 
 nance of strong and useful life. But man, instead, makes life synony- 
 mous with ceaseless toil and moil. The earth he turns into a mighty 
 workshop, where his hours of respite are few, and his cares and worries 
 many. He toils for more food than he can eat, for more clothes than he 
 needs, for more money than he can wisely spend, for more power than 
 needed to keep his own, for more knowledge than required to guide him 
 aright. Why this life-long slavery for what is not needed ? Why this 
 care and worry for that which, when attained, brings but more of burden ? 
 For what is increase of wealth but a recognition of one's poverty ? What 
 is increase of power but a recognition of one's feebleness ? What is increase 
 of knowledge but increase of ignorance, increase of pleasure but increase 
 of pain, increase of fame but increase of defamers? 
 
 Yet, what is all toil and trouble compared with the satisfaction of 
 living on other peoples' lips, of filling a place in other peoples' minds, of
 
 seeing one's name conspicuous in public movements, of 
 
 name. 
 
 being well spoken of, well thought of by friend and stran- For the sake of a 
 
 ger, near and far. Here is the solution why man slaves 
 for more than he needs to maintain life, or to guide him aright. His aim 
 is a name. No man is a nonentity from choice. However great his in- 
 difference to other things, he never seeks of his own accord to pass for a 
 cipher. Men fear unimportance more than want, and oblivion more than 
 death. There are those who, if they cannot be famous, will rather be 
 infamous than be unknown altogether. Every man would figure as a 
 somebody, and to gratify his desire he knows he must distinguish himself 
 in some way above his surrounding fellow-creatures, he must achieve or 
 possess something that others have not to attract his neighbors' attention. 
 For the prize of a name men will resist temptations that no other motive 
 could be powerful enough to withstand, and dare feats that no other gain 
 could tempt. Men will pluck a name from the very jaws of death; will 
 ascend into the very heavens to wrest it from the gods, will descend into 
 the lowest hells to seize it from the grasp of Satan himself, will make of 
 their bodies torture-chambers and of their brains seething caldrons, will 
 freeze and starve to death at the North Pole, or throw themselves as prey 
 to deadly fevers, to ferocious beasts and men in Africa's interior, will 
 search heaven and earth for new discoveries and new contrivances, and 
 not hesitate to surrender their lives and all as purchase-price. 
 
 It is fortunate that such a craving is implanted in our nature. With- 
 out it, we would be like beasts foraging for food and crouching in our 
 
 lairs, havine no other aim than appeasing the innerman 
 Craving for a 
 name the driv- and protecting the outer. The desire of enjoying a good 
 
 progress ' name has been the creator of most of our genius, the 
 
 driving-wheel of our best talents. It has converted sav- 
 agery into civilization, cowards into heroes, idlers into doers. It is the 
 propelling force of progress, of enterprise, of achievement. It is the root 
 of virtue. It preserves the integrity of the individual, the sanctity of the 
 home, the purity of society, the peace of the nation. 
 
 When such benefits are the products of a good name, when such 
 sacrifices are made and such hardships endured for it, when all men's 
 actions are more or less animated by it, one would reasonably have ex- 
 pected to find men and women in the undisturbed enjoyment of whatever 
 name they have honorably acquired, and others encouraged to strive for 
 the same end, that society may be benefited by the possessions of a larger 
 number of people, who pay the costly price of hard and noble service for 
 the honor of enjoying a good name. But it is the opposite rather that 
 we find. 
 
 Detraction of a good name is more frequently met with than recog- 
 nition of it. Calumny runs more fluently from tongues than praise. 
 
 The more eager men are for praise the readier they often 
 Detraction of 
 name a common are to deny it to others. The more anxious men are to 
 
 be well thought of by others, the more willing they often 
 are to think little of others, and, if it must be, to fabricate the reason for
 
 belittling their name. As there are eyes that get wild with rage when 
 the color red is held before them, so are there ears that become frenzied 
 with malice at hearing another man praised. You can easily turn many 
 a comedian into a tragedian, many a musician's pianissimo into a violent 
 fortissimo, many a preacher from lamb to wolf, by merely saying a word 
 of praise of a brother colleague in their hearing. The most praise-deserv- 
 ing often has the scantiest recognition, or is most exposed to slander's 
 tongue. Reputations built up through long years of painful toil and 
 self-denial, are not infrequently torn down, sullied forever, in less time 
 than it takes to tell it. Pulling down is easier work than pulling up. 
 There are plants so sensitive that the merest touch will wither them. 
 Equally as delicate is a good name. Touch it with unclean hands, or 
 breathe the breath of foul slander upon it, and not all the sands of all the 
 oceans will remove the stain, nor will all the perfumes of Arabia sweeten 
 it again. So easy a work is such detraction, and of so cheap a price, that 
 everybody can afford the luxury of indulging it. Their number is small, 
 who do not sometime seek to whiten their own names by blackening 
 those of others. Alexander Pope is right: 
 
 " The world with calumny abounds, 
 The whitest virtue slander wounds; 
 There are whose joy is night and day 
 To talk a character away: 
 Eager from rout to rout they haste 
 To blast the generous and the chaste, 
 And hunting reputation down, 
 Proclaim their triumphs through the town." 
 
 I know not whether it is the ease with which this sin is committed, 
 or the impunity which it enjoys, that is responsible for its wide prev- 
 alence. Neither can I tell whether it was always as 
 
 D . 4.1- T j i . , Its prevalence 
 
 common as now. But this I do know: it was not always due to exemption 
 
 as safe. It was a dangerous business at one time to tarn- from punishment 
 per with a man's reputation. The man convicted in the time of Alfred 
 the Great of having maliciously spread an evil report against his neigh- 
 bor had his tongue cut out. Were such a law enacted now-a-days, we 
 would either see a mighty stampede into the well-nigh deserted truth- 
 telling camp, or see our earth fast becoming a vast Dumb- Asylum. In 
 other countries those guilty of unjustly detracting from the character of 
 others had the word SLANDERER stamped with a hot iron on their foreheads. 
 Were that practice now in vogue, our ladies would wear their bangs thicker 
 and deeper over their foreheads than now, and our men would imitate 
 that style of hairdress with surprising rapidity. In other countries those 
 convicted of having written a defamation of another's good name, had 
 their right arms cut off. Were such a punishment still meted out to 
 calumniators, an amazingly large crop of one-armed war veterans would 
 suddenly spring up, our campaign-liars would fast exchange their stumps 
 for the position of one-armed flagmen at railway-crossings, and many of 
 our lawyers and diplomats, authors, editors and preachers, would be
 
 4, 
 
 obliged to take to writing with their left hands, or to thinking with their 
 right minds. 
 
 Even in ancient times, few sins were looked upon with as much of con- 
 tempt as slander. Of the four classes that will never be admitted into the 
 
 presence of the Divine Majesty, the Rabbis of old mention 
 Slander more 
 detestable than the liar as one and the slanderer as another.* Even the 
 
 Spirits of Evil, some of the ancient sages declare, detest 
 the backbiter; ' God will judge and condemn him from above, and the 
 Prince of Sheol from below. 'f The thief and murderer have not even 
 awakened such scorn as the malicious defamer of character. There are 
 thieves whose boldness and daring and chivalrous spirits involuntarily 
 win our admiration, and tempt us to more lenient judgment. The same 
 is true of some murderers. We stand aghast at their deeds, but their 
 valor, their perilous adventures, their passion, at times force our admira- 
 tion ; we pity the circumstances that led to their crime, we seek to palli" 
 ate the offense by suspecting some mental aberration. We have had 
 criminals, who became popular idols, for whom women raved, whom to 
 imitate became the highest ambition of youth, and whom men immortal- 
 ized in romance and poetry, characters such as Dick Turpin, Jonathan 
 Wild, Jack Sheppard, or brigands of the Fra Diavalo and Karl Moor 
 type, which the opera and the drama have made familiar to us. But the 
 slanderer has never yet awakened any other feeling than the most con- 
 temptuous scorn. We despise him for the want of that courageous and 
 chivalrous spirit wherewith even thieves and murderers win our admira- 
 tion and pity. We despise that cowardice that in cold blood, with malice 
 aforethought, stabs a man in his back, that attacks him when and where 
 he cannot defend himself, that, like the serpent in the grass, stings him 
 when least suspected, robs him of what took infinite toil to build up, and 
 what all the treasures of the earth, what an eternity of time, cannot 
 restore. We know of no insult that so touches us to the quick, that so 
 makes our blood to boil as to be called a slanderer. There is the serpent's 
 hiss in that word. It injects its poison into the wounded feeling, that 
 will not heal till the insult has been resented In countries where duel- 
 ling is in practice to call a man a libeller is an offense which only blood 
 can expiate. 
 
 We do not wonder at the severity and contempt with 
 most fatal. which slander has been punished. What enemy mightier 
 
 than it! What poison more fatal! What weapon sharper! 
 
 " 'Tis slander 
 
 Whose edge is sharper than the sword; whose tongue 
 Outvenoms all the worms of Nile; whose breath 
 Rides on the pasting winds, and doth belie 
 All corners of the world: kings, queens, and states, 
 Maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave 
 This viporous slander enters." Cymbeline, Act III, Sc. iv. 
 
 It but whispers a word or two, utters but a monosyllable, points but its 
 
 *Ta1m. Babl. Sanhedrin, 103, a. fibid. Erchin, 15 b.
 
 finger, shrugs but its shoulder, raises but its eye-brow, and a fair name is 
 sullied, a happy home is blasted, sweet and comforting relationships are 
 broken up, and society is robbed of one of the strongest incentives for 
 the elevation of the individual and for the progress of humanity. One's 
 good name gone, and all is gone. Other losses may be restored, but the 
 name that has become slander's prey can never be wholly recovered. 
 We may deny and defend, and prove the slander a base invention, but the 
 report that has once gone abroad is beyond recall. Of the hundred that 
 have heard the slander ten may hear the denial, and five of these may 
 believe it. The foul finger marks will remain. The scar which the ser- 
 pent's tooth has left will abide forever. The shaken confidence, the broken 
 union, though restored, will forever show the signs of mending. Suspi- 
 cion will linger, and grow into slander again, when its victim is in the 
 grave, and no longer able to defend himself. Children and children's 
 children will bear the marks of the mire and venom with which the cal- 
 umniator besmirched a fair ancestral name. 
 
 " For slander lives upon succession; 
 For-ever housed, where it gets possession." 
 
 Comedy of Errors, Act III, Sc. i. 
 
 ' ' Forever housed where it gets possession ' ' ah, who can tell a more 
 pitiful story of this than Israel, and on what day more appropriately than 
 
 this ? This is our Christian neighbors' Baster Sunday. 
 
 * Illustrated by the 
 In thousands of sanctuaries, consecrated to peace and Christian's 
 
 good- will, there is repeated to-day, amidst great pomp slander of the 
 and festivity, one of the foulest slanders that was ever 
 conceived by human brain, and ever uttered by human lips. On this 
 day, some eighteen hundred years ago, an ancient solar festival, (com- 
 memorative of the vernal equinox, and of earth's resurrection from winter's 
 death, and celebrated by heathen nations by fictitious slaying and burying 
 and resurrecting of their sun-god idol) was converted into an historic 
 event. Of the Sun-God, a Son of God was made, and around him they 
 wove a fantastic tissue of heathen-borrowed myth. They brought him 
 down from Heaven to walk the earth in human guise, to suffer and to be 
 crucified, according to the Father's own decree, and to the Son's special 
 wish, to atone with his blood for the sins of a depraved people, and 
 thereby to appease the wrath of an angry Father. Then they singled out 
 a number of men from a particular people to perform the work, on which 
 the salvation of all human kind, past, present and future, depended. 
 And when they had done the deed, which, according to such a dogma, 
 ought to have been regarded the most glorious service ever rendered by 
 man to man, they were rewarded with infamy and infinite suffering, and 
 not only the participators themselves, but also the whole people of which 
 they formed an infinitesimal part, some of whom lived hundreds of miles 
 .away from the scene of action. 
 
 So much for the myth. As to the historic kernel underlying it, you 
 tnow the story of that noble brother of ours, who, in his zeal for his 
 people, unfortunately permitted himself to be deluded by his enthusiastic
 
 followers into the belief, that he was the Political Deliverer, for whom 
 the Judeans were then hoping and praying, to redeem them from the 
 tyranny of the Roman conqueror. You know the story of the treason- 
 able entry, at a time of political unrest and frequent seditious uprisings, 
 into Jerusalem, that was under the watchful guardianship of the Roman 
 legions, especially at the approach of the Passover, when every male 
 Israelite made his pilgrimage to the Holy City. You "know of the mad- 
 ness of his proclamation as "King of Israel" in the very sight of the 
 Roman Standards. What followed you know. Rome, never tolerant, 
 never generous, always cruel, nailed this enthusiast, as it had nailed others 
 before, on the cross, with a crown of thorns on his head and with a mock- 
 inscription over it, to warn other aspirants against a similar fate. What 
 followed this you also know, and that is the saddest part of this whole 
 sad story. The tragedy of one slander turned into a tragedy of a whole 
 nation; the crucifixion of a day it turned into a crucifixion of eighteen 
 centuries. As time passed on the brief story of this tragic event was 
 transmitted from mouth to mouth of his devoted followers, and, as is the 
 fate of all oral transmissions, it grew in size, in marvelousness, till it 
 became utterly impossible to tell exactly where history ended and where 
 legend began. As the years rolled on, it passed from Jew to the Roman- 
 ized Gentile, who blended his own myths with this myth-history, and 
 made the confusion greater still. And as conversions among the Roman- 
 ized world became more and more frequent, and hostilities against the 
 great mass of the Jews, who refuted to believe in the Messiahship of the 
 Nazarene Martyr, grew more and more bitter, it dawned in some mind 
 as an excellent propagandic policy, as a powerful mean to conciliate the 
 Romans, who, for political reasons, likewise hated the Jews, to clear them 
 of all guilt, to credit them with a saintly character, to represent them as 
 helpless weaklings in the hands of the Jews, and to pile the whole 
 responsibility upon the innocent heads of the martyr's own brethren. 
 
 Thus was that slander born, that has made an innocent people a 
 scorn and a byword among the nations of the earth. Thus was that 
 slander born, that for eighteen centuries long made the Jew a fugitive 
 and an outcast, in every land where that Prince of Peace and Good Will, 
 their own brother, was worshipped. For this slander was the Jew made, 
 eighteen hundred years long, to saturate the soil of half of the inhabited 
 world with his heart's blood, was he made to endure excruciating agonies 
 in torture chambers and on autos da fe, was he made to suffer heart- 
 rending cruelties, nameless insults, loss of human, rights, exclusion from 
 respectable society and callings. And to our own days this slander has 
 endured, so true are Shakespeare's words, that "slander lives upon suc- 
 ces^ion; for-ever housed, where it gets possession." To this day an 
 innocent posterity is treated with contempt, is slandered and vilified, is 
 suspected and hated, for a crime falsely charged to a no less innocent 
 ancestry. Could you but hear some of the sermons that are delivered 
 to-day, some of the cruel epithets that are hurled at the brethren of Him 
 they worship, you would need no further proof to be convinced of the
 
 ineradicableness of slander's poison. The learned Academies have entered 1 
 their protest, the damaging contradictions in the different Gospels have 
 been made manifest, the heathen sources of gospel stories have been laid 
 bare, the analysis of Jewish History, Literature, Laws, Customs and 
 Institutions have given the lie to these false charges. It has availed 
 nothing. The slander liwes, and Israel suffers. 
 
 This form of slander, of creating a libel out of nothing, of condemning 
 whole peoples through countless generations, without the intermixture of a 
 grain of truth in its support, though the most pernicious, 
 is fortunately not the most frequent. Of peoples as coun- T ^g Half/f nith 
 tryless and as defenseless as Israel the world has not many, 
 and prudence suggests greater care and justice in speaking of larger and 
 more powerful nations. Had Rome not been so mighty, and her influ- 
 ence and protection not so desirable, and her people not so subject to 
 conversion, and had Israel not been so weak, it would never have been 
 made to suffer for her crime. It is an old trick of might to make the 
 wrong appear right, and the right appear wrong, and to play the roll of 
 the mighty has never been Israel's privilege or misfortune. But of the 
 other forms of slander we have much more. There is that insinuating 
 slander of the Half-Truth, that tells all the faults it knows of a neighbor, 
 and carefully conceals all his good qualities, a single one of which might 
 atone for all the other faults combined, were it but known. It is an old 
 sin, one that Juvenal already satirized, in language as strong as this: 
 
 " There's a lust in man no charm can tame 
 Of loudly publishing our neighbor's shame; 
 On eagle's wings immortal scandals fly, 
 While virtuous actions are but born to die." 
 
 Satire IX. Transl. Stephen Harvey. 
 
 There is that slander that hears but the side that is derogatory of a. 
 neighbor's character, and makes the most of it, without taking the trouble 
 
 of assuring itself whether there be any truth at all in the 
 
 , . The slander of 
 report, and, if there be r what the accused has to say in his the Haif-Testi- 
 
 defense. It is said of Aristides, that he lent but one ear mony - 
 to one who accused another behind his back; the other ear he held shut, 
 saying, that he reserved it for the accused, and that he will not suffer one 
 ear to believe till the other has also heard. No wonder he was called the 
 "Just," for other men generally adopt a different course; they keep both 
 ears wide open to scandal and accusation, and both tightly shut against 
 denial and defense. We feel incensed over that Russian procedure that 
 arrests, convicts, transports, a man upon the merest suspicion of political, 
 intrigue, without as much as granting a hearing to the accused. We burn 
 with indignation when we read of that Robespierrian tyranny during the 
 French Revolution, that condemned a man to the guillotine upon no. 
 stronger evidence of guilt than mere suspicion, that only admitted 
 evidence against the accused,, never a witness in his favor. But how 
 often are not we ourselves guilty of similar wrongs. How often do 
 not we ourselves condemn a man upon the merest suspicion, without
 
 granting him a hearing, without confronting him with his accuser, with- 
 out permitting him to submit evidence in his own behalf. We hear, 
 believe, condemn, and speedily tell it to others that they likewise may 
 believe and condemn. Few are they, who, at hearing an evil report 
 against another will say with the Latins of old "Audiatur etaltera pars'* 
 let the other side also be heard before sentence is passed. 
 There is that slander that 
 
 ' trusts not to tongue alone, 
 But speaks a language of its own 
 Stabs with a nod, a shrug, a look, 
 Far better than a printed book; 
 Conveys a libel in a frown, 
 And winks a reputation down.' 
 
 Swift, Journal of a Modern lM.dy:* 
 
 Who knows not those polished and diplomatic cut-throats and assas- 
 sins that never commit themselves by word or pen, but employ instead 
 
 the deadly artillery of facial pantomime, the double- 
 The slander of J . J 
 
 malevolent gesti- edged dagger of significant look, gesture, shrug, sneer 
 
 and mow down the strongholds of character though not 
 a sound is heard, stab a reputation to the heart though not a word is said, 
 blast a career though not a syllable is used for ammunition ? Who knows 
 not those men and women who, when you ask them for an opinion con- 
 cerning the character of another, or who, when listening to your praise 
 of another, drum with their fingers, pull up their noses, wrinkle their 
 brows, break out in a whistle or in an ejaculation, or shake their heads 
 and look mightily knowing, to put you on your guard, to make you 
 believe that if they but wanted, they could a mighty tale unfold, but 
 they wouldn't do it for the world, they have too much good breeding, 
 they have too much consideration, and yet say more in their silence, do 
 more harm with their feigned anxiety to spare, than they possibly could 
 have done with all the language at their command, for they give the 
 suspicion which they have aroused within you boundless sway to roam 
 over every possible crime, while the suspected may be innocent of even 
 the slightest? 
 
 Of what profit is it, you may ask, to filch from another his good 
 name? Selfish gain is perhaps the strongest motive. The slandered 
 
 may be a dangerous rival, whose riddance is much desired. 
 Zander 380118 fOr Envy is another cause. There are those who may have 
 
 an abundance of fame, and yet cannot hear another 
 praised without spurting the poison of vituperation upon him. Vanity 
 is another source. There are those who believe that independent and 
 original thinking and doing best show themselves in running down the 
 thoughts and deeds of another. Fanaticism is another source. There 
 are those who would have all the world believe as they do, and think it 
 their religious duty to denounce and vilify all who differ from- them. 
 Idleness and ignorance are perhaps the commonest sources of all. There 
 
 * Slightly altered.
 
 are those, who will run others down, without really bearing them any 
 malice, without expecting to derive the slightest profit from their detrac- 
 tion, simply to have somebody to talk about, to pass an hour or two 
 pleasantly away with running down a dozen or two of characters. I have 
 read of a hostess who, annoyed at an evening party, over the dullness of 
 the conversation of her guests, asked an intimate friend of hers, a pretty 
 and brilliant young lady, to go home, that the conversation may become 
 animated by having somebody to run down. 
 
 And for such base reasons must many a good name be sacrificed, on 
 the attainment of which infinite labor may have been expended, and 
 
 from the preservation of which endless benefits may ac- 
 
 Close ear to slan- 
 crue to humanity. And since calumniation is one of the der and slanderer 
 
 commonest of our vices, since no name that is at all worth 
 
 detraction escapes calumny, it may be a pertinent ques- 
 
 tion to ask (chivalrously taking it for granted that we ourselves have 
 
 never been guilty of slander) whether we have not encouraged it by turn- 
 
 ing a ready ear to the slanderer ? 
 
 , Close your ears to slander and you' 11 soon close the slanderer's mouth. 
 Bar your doors against it, and it will soon starve and freeze to death upon 
 
 the street. Even though you be free from the sin of 
 
 . . To preserve our 
 
 slander, if you listen to it and repeat it to others, you are own name we 
 
 as guilty as the slanderer. Your credulity encourages him 1 that 
 
 to other murders of innocent names, and your aiding in 
 its circulation makes you accessories to his crime. If you wish to preserve 
 the honor of your own names, you must sacredly guard that of others. 
 If you wish to be fairly dealt with by others, even so must you deal with 
 them. Only by leniently judging'the failings of others, by making just 
 allowances, by carefully concealing with one hand another's shame, while 
 trying to correct it with the other, can you fairly count on similar treat- 
 ment by others. Never believe that people will always treat you any 
 better than you treat them. The world is a faithful looking-glass, as you 
 look at it, it looks back at you. The counsel the wise Ben Sirach gave 
 some twenty centuries ago is still safe to follow: 
 
 " Question a friend, it may be he did not; 
 And if he did something that he do it no more. 
 Question thy neighbor, it may be he said it not; 
 And if he hath said it, that he do it not again. 
 Question a friend for many a time it is a slander, 
 And believe not every report. 
 
 Many a one maketh a slip with his tongue and his heart meaneth nothing by it. 
 And who hath not sinned with his tongue ? 
 Question thy neighbor before thou threatenest, 
 And give place to the law of the Most High." 
 
 Ecclesiasticus, xix, 13-17. 
 
 As for the rest, the simple rule to follow is to take as little notice as 
 
 possible of slander, to treat other people's uncharitable 
 
 Silence slander 
 opinion of you as Emperor Theodosius did, who prohib- bv treating it 
 
 ited the punishment of any man who spoke against him, ^Jj," 1 * 
 saying: " What was spoken slightly is to be laughed at;
 
 Tvhat spitefully, is to be pardoned; what angrily, is to be pitied, what 
 justly is to be thanked." Only treat the slanderer with patient silence, 
 he will tire of his venom, just as the dog tires of baying the moon. You 
 are never so near proving the truth of his defamation than when you 
 stoop to take notice of him. Lowering yourselves to his level you may 
 be tempted to copy his tactics, and become vipers yourselves. Keep 
 calm, maintain your dignity, and you will find that 
 
 " No falsehood can endure 
 Touch of celestial temper." 
 
 Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, Line 8n. 
 
 So live that a blameless life may be your only answer to slander's tongue. 
 So live that noble deed may give the lie to the calumniator's detraction. 
 So live that the traducer's persecutions, instead of awakening fear, may 
 be pleasing compliments to you. So live that even though the world deny 
 you justice, your own conscience may know your purpose holy, your char- 
 acter spotless, your name unstained.
 
 A Plea for Noble Ambition. 
 
 RABHI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF. D. D. 
 
 Philadelphia, April 24th, 1892. 
 
 (Exod. xx. 17) -nnr\ 
 
 (Jerem. vi. 131 ;V3 ;'i'O l^D D^nj l; 
 
 i. Habak. ii. 9) irn 1 ? ;"* >'V3 '3 'in 
 
 We read in the /?00 <?/" Esther of the great honors shown by the 
 Persian King Ahasvenis to his Prima Minister ffaman, how he raised 
 him above all the princes of the realm, commanded all 
 his court-officers and attendants to bow down before him, 53en5le*' d "^ 
 and to reverence him. In one so highly honored, so 
 abundantly blessed with all the heart could desire, one might reasonably 
 have expected to find a truly happy man. But the Scriptures assure us 
 of the contrary, tells us of his discontent and vexation of spirit because 
 some insignificant Jew, Mordecai by name, who frequented the palace 
 gate, refused to bow down before him and to do him reverence, and ac- 
 quaints us with the tragic end of his brilliant career, because, not contented 
 with the honor shown him by king and princes, he sought to revenge 
 himself on some insignificant mortal, for refusing to bow before him. 
 
 This story furnishes a rich field for moralizers, and they have not 
 been slow in taking advantage of it. Haman has come to be looked upon 
 as a type of a man insatiably greedy after honors, and his miserable end 
 is held up to the ambitious as a warning. Mordecai, however, is lauded 
 to the skies for his moral courage, for daring to refuse to a powerful min- 
 ister, to a mighty king's favorite, an honor which belongs to God alone, 
 and his example is held up to others for faithful imitation. I must con- 
 fess, I have never been able to approve of all the vituperation that has 
 been heaped upon the Persian, nor share all the praise that has been 
 lavished upon the Jew. I have before this given my reasons for doubting 
 the historic worth of the Book of Esther. ;: Such a portrayal of character 
 as here given of Mordecai strengthens my doubt. One, that stood as near 
 to the throne as he, would have known what honor is due to the chief 
 minister of the realm, would not have begrudged showing a respect which 
 an orientalist is only too glad to show; nor would he, as a scarcely tole- 
 rated Jew in a stranger's land, have been so imprudent as to invite upon 
 his people a fearful persecution, by refusing to honor a distinguished 
 
 *See The Feast of Esther. Series I, n.
 
 official of another faith and people, which his religion did not prohibit, 
 and of which some of his most illustrious ancestors have set the example. 
 
 As to the character of Haman, its delineation is faithful enough to 
 allow a belief in the possibility of its having been a pen picture of some 
 covetous official in the remote past If historic, he deserves more of our 
 pity than our censure. We are dealing then with a patient rather than 
 with a criminal, with one of those unfortunates, of whom history has 
 recorded many, who lost control over the fiery steeds of ambition, which, - 
 dashing off like mad, hurled him at last over the dizzying precipice down- 
 into the horrible abyss. 
 
 Ambition's fiery steeds scamper along in every sound mind. In 
 some they run with a quicker pace than in others, but present they are 
 in each, placed there by nature's own hand, and for each 
 rae b coCree OD the man ' s good so long as he keeps the reins well in hand. 
 But that is not an easy task. The racers are many. The 
 desire not to be outstripped by a neighbor is strong. Almost involunta- 
 rily the hand seizes the whip at the sound of the fast-gaining rival behind. 
 To overtake the one in front becomes the passion of the one behind. 
 Faster and faster and more and more painfully falls the whip upon the steeds. 
 They shoot forward with lightning speed; the track flies from under their 
 feet. The racers are now side by side in dangerous proximity. They are 
 wild with excitement Now the one leads; now it is the other. The steeds 
 are covered with foam. The drivers are hoarse from shouting, and blind 
 from the dust. They hear not the cries of warning. They see not the 
 beings and objects they run down in their mad course. One rival sink* 
 exhausted on the track. Another quickly takes his place. He, too, 
 falls; and another; and another; and yet others. The road is strewn 
 with wrecks and ruins, with gasping and mortally wounded steeds 
 and drivers. One succeeds in getting far ahead of all his rivals; he has 
 none to fear; still he flies into a passion at the sight of a crawling blind 
 old nag he chances to pass, and brings his lash heavily down upon his 
 breathless steeds to run the harmless traveller down. At last he is the 
 only one left upon the tracks. He has gratified his passion; the victory 
 is his. Fatigued, he seeks to halt his coursers, but they no longer obey 
 his call or command. The more he pulls back, the faster they shoot 
 forward. On, on they rush, till at length steeds, chariot and driver tum- 
 ble together in a heap of hopeless exhaustion. 
 
 It is only on some such pathological theory as this that we can account 
 for that strange disease of many men, who, with honors thick upon them, 
 
 without a rival to fear, with ample treasures and pleas- 
 Excessive ambi- . 
 
 tion leads to the ures at their command, will permit themselves to become 
 disease: covetous- unna ppy ( or frenzied with rage and malice, because some 
 
 insignificant fellow refuses to doff his hat to them, or 
 because some by -street shopkeeper dares to catch a few penny customers. 
 What we condemn in them as avarice or envy, is often but the after-effect 
 of years of uncontrolled ambition. They have been on the race-track so 
 long, have been dominated for so many years by the passion of reach- 
 ing the goal the soonest, and plucking the prize the first, have for so many
 
 years kept a sharp eye on competitors, and have run down feared and 
 dangerous rivals so long, till their passion turned into disease, compelling 
 them to continue the race though they have long since reached and 
 passed the goal, to fear and suspect every man as their rival, to feel 
 envious of, and miserable at, another man's success, and to have no 
 peace, no comfort, till the breathless steeds of their ambition have run 
 them down and utterly destroyed them. 
 
 I have said that Hamaii deserves our pity rather than our condem- 
 nation, if for 110 other reason than in self-defense, in extenuation of a sin, 
 from which, I am sure, but the fewest of us are free. 
 
 . Who is insensible 
 
 We have before us in Hainan the intensified form of a of honor is insen- 
 
 passiou that has a distinguished place in the minds of most Slble of shame - 
 of us. We all love honor, and very many of us are engaged in a hot race 
 after it, though not many of us may be willing to admit it as frankly as 
 did King Henry V, whom Shakespeare makes to say: 
 
 " If it be a sin to covet honor, 
 I am the most offending soul alive." 
 
 King Henry V Act IV. Sc. 3. 
 
 and I am as much in doubt as King Henry was, the tenth commandment 
 to the contrary notwithstanding, as to whether " it be a sin to covet honor." 
 I am strongly inclined to suspect a man of being insensible of shame who is 
 insensible of honor. Show me the man who tells you that he cares for 
 neither honor or fortune, that he is contented with obscurity or poverty, 
 ^nd I will show you either a prevaricator or a fool. His very posing as a 
 man, who cares not for honors often but cloaks a greedy appetite for it, as 
 there are people who parade more haughtiness in their ostentatious exhi- 
 bition of exceeding humbleness and modesty than they possibly could 
 have done by any of the regular modes of displaying pride. If the tenth 
 commandment be understood to prohibit the cherishing of some noble 
 ambition, the setting of some other man's great success and honor before 
 us as a goal to attain, through personal effort, similar fortunes and stations, 
 then the man, who has never transgressed against it, must be of the cate- 
 gory of that boy who never told a lie because he was dumb, must never 
 have had brain enough and energy enough to cherish, and strive for, a 
 noble ambition. 
 
 I have never held that commandment responsible for so absurd a 
 teaching. Man should be ambitious, he shall covet konors and fortunes, 
 and he will, commandment or no commandment. God 
 has taken good care to implant the instinct of ambition ^ambition?** 8 * 
 deep in human nature, especially in its most illustrious 
 representatives, to make the progress of humanity not a matter of choice 
 but of compulsion. But for that attribute, we never would have advanced 
 as we have, we never could have advanced at all, judging from the com- 
 parison between the unambitious beast and the ambitious human being, 
 or between the stagnant oriental villager and the enterprising citizen of 
 -an occidental metropolis. 
 
 Ambition is the salt that preserves the mind from stagnation, and 
 the body from decay. But for it, our greatest powers would never come
 
 to light, our noblest faculties would rust unused. It is the baton that 
 holds our best energies harmoniously together and starts them off in 
 rythmic motion. It is the lash that drives our blood into healthful flow 
 and our mind into useful activity. It is the source of all the mind values 
 highest, and all the heart cherishes the most. It has laid the foundation 
 of the first place of worship, and the corner-stone of the first school, and 
 there has not been a church or school since that owed not its existence 
 to it It has steeled the arm of the first warrior, and has made every dis- 
 tinguished soldier laugh at danger ever since. It has guided the pen of 
 the first writer, and of every writer since. It has inspired the mind of 
 the first reformer, lawgiver, discoverer, inventor, and of all their count- 
 less successors since. It has taken the first ship across the ocean, and 
 the first locomotive across the land; sunk the first shaft into the earth, 
 stretched the first telegraph over the continents, and the first cables under 
 the seas. It has started more enterprises than mind has knowledge of, 
 and has brought more blessings into the world than man can count. 
 For all the comforts of life we are indebted to it. It has lightened our 
 burdens and heightened our joys. It has widened our horizon and deep- 
 ened our knowledge. It has removed life's trials and tribulations further 
 off, and has brought heaven nearer. To say, therefore, that this innate 
 spirit of ambition, that ever urges man forward and onward, that ever 
 impels him to think more and to achieve more, to be more and to have 
 more, is a violation of the Tenth Commandment, is contrary to the will 
 of God, is simply madness. * 
 
 I know that in speaking a word in favor of ambition, I run counter 
 the stereotyped commonplaces wherewith it has been attacked both in 
 
 speech and in print. Few" quotations and illustrations 
 Ambitum ra are mO re fluent on our lips than those which belabor 
 
 wealth, belittle honor, and elevate the sweets of content- 
 ment. Our nursery tales and Sunday School Literature are full of such 
 morals. Our primers revel in them. Our preachers find them grateful 
 subjects, and poets delight in turning them into popular rhymes. Lines 
 such as Shakespeare put into the mouth of Cardinal Wolsey: 
 
 " Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition, 
 By that sin fell the angels; how can man then, 
 The image of his Maker, hope to win by it." 
 
 Henry I 'III Act III., So. 2. 
 or such as these: 
 
 " Alas! the joys that fortune brings 
 Are trifling, and decay; 
 And those who prize the trifling things 
 More trifling still than they." 
 
 spring up, uncalled, in our memories as soon as the subject is but broached; 
 and pastorals and farm-ballads that contrast the palace of the rich with 
 the cottage of the poor, the rich fare and costly costume of the one with 
 the frugal meal and humble dress of the other, and show how, despite 
 the difference, the lot of the poor is far more enviable than that of the 
 rich, are constantly appealed to in praise of contentment, and in condem- 
 nation of ambition. The whole vocabulary of abuse is piled on wealth.
 
 Tt is designated as the root of every evil, the source of every woe, 
 the bane of every bliss. It is the curse of society, and we are warned 
 against the seductive tempter that conceals the fatal poison. In eloquent 
 terms the fascinations of mediocrity, are portrayed to us, and no labor is 
 spared to convince us of the wisdom of Agur of old in praying that ' God 
 may- give him neither poverty nor riches '* and of Goldsmith's cleverness 
 in regarding " ignorance of wealth " the "best riches, "f 
 
 But, strange, with all the bitter denunciation of ambition, with all 
 the eloquence and rhetoric in favor of poverty or mediocrity, with all 
 the abundance of literature in all languages, ages, climes, 
 against fame and fortune, there has never been a cessation m'm^u^eefed 
 in the intense race and struggle among all the people 
 for whatever honor and riches there was to be had. And what is stranger 
 still, they that write and speak most vehemently against ambition, are, 
 as a rule, in keenest and hottest pursuit after it. There have been writers 
 and speakers who worked hard, even while writing and speaking on the 
 beauties of mediocrity, to reach the highest place and the fattest salary, 
 and they would never have forgiven you had you asked them whether 
 their work was an illustration of the mediocrity they so much praised. 
 People have been too busy obeying the forward-urging instincts of their 
 nature, and too conscious of the hypocrisy of the eulogizers of poverty or 
 mediocrity, to pay much attention to such sophistries. They knew that, 
 at best, their rhetoric was but a sugar-coating of a very bitter pill, which 
 adverse circumstances obliged them to swajlow, or a revengeful thrust at 
 the honored and the wealthy, who were not in the least ruffled by it, 
 knowing that though much pitied by the panegyrists .of obscurity, it 
 would not have been safe to offer to exchange with them. 
 
 Neither have they been much dissuaded from the ambitious course 
 on which they were bent, by the saws and sermons on the mockery of 
 fame and the misery of wealth, by people who have had a surfeit of glory, 
 and whom age or feebleness had incapacitated from continuing in the 
 excitement of the race, or from any longer drawing enjoyment from their 
 fame or fortune. A thousand death-bed warnings against the bubble of 
 glory are not one half as much of a deterrent, as the sight of the honor 
 shown to one celebrated man, or of the pleasures and possibilities within 
 the reach of one wealthy man, acts as a spur. 
 
 People have also learned to understand what is generally included 
 under contentment, or under the modest term of mediocrity. Thomson 
 
 only asks for 
 
 " An elegant sufficiency, content 
 Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books. 
 Ease and alternate labor, useful life 
 Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven." 
 
 The Seasons Spring; Line 1158. 
 
 Who would not be content with such an abundance of blessings, or who 
 would refuse to be poor or mediocre with such treasures as these as his 
 own? Who can acquire these without bringing a large amount of ambition 
 
 *Pro. xxx, S. .t.THe Traveller.
 
 into play, or can rest content after honorably acquiring as much as 
 this ? He that by hard and honest toil has secured for himself ' an elegant 
 sufficiency, friendship, books, ease, useful life, progressive virtue, ' will not, 
 and cannot, rest on his laurels, and say: "I am done, I have nothing 
 more to wish for or to strive for." Our distinguished author Holmes has 
 amused himself not a little over such conceptions of contented poverty or 
 mediocrity as this Thomsonian one, and has added one of his own in the 
 following clever satire: 
 
 " L,ittle I ask; my wants are few; Honors are silly toys, I know. 
 
 I only wish a hut of stone, And titles are but empty names; 
 
 (A very plain brown stone will do,) I would, perhaps, be Plenipo, 
 
 That I may call my own; But only near St. James; 
 
 And close at hand is such a one, I'm very sure I should not care 
 
 In yonder street that fronts the sun. To fill our Gubernator's chair. 
 
 Plain food is quite enough for me; Jewels are bawbles; 't is a sin 
 
 Three courses are as good as ten; To care for such unfruitful things; 
 
 If Nature can subsist on three, One good-sized diamond in a pin 
 
 Thank Heaven for three. Amen ! Some, not so large, in rings, 
 
 I always thought cold victuals nice; A rubv - and a P ear1 ' or so > 
 
 My choice would be vanilla-ice. wm do for me ! J lau h at show - 
 
 ********* 
 
 I care not much for gold or land;- Thus humb i e Jet me live and die, 
 
 Give me a mortgage here and there, Nor long for Midas' golden touch; 
 
 Some good bank-stock,-some note of hand, If Heaven more generous gifts deny, 
 
 Or trifling railroad share, I shall not miss them much, 
 
 I only ask that fortune send Too grateful for the blessing lent 
 
 A little more than I shall spend. Of simple tastes and mind content ! 
 
 That there have been those that have been contented with very little, 
 and have been happier with it than others with very much I shall not 
 
 deny. Did not Diogenes content himself with a barrel 
 The unambitious 
 
 not the world's for a home, and have we not had hermits contented with 
 benefactors. yet lesg? But for how mucll i s the world's civilization 
 
 indebted to such men as these ? What have they done to promote the 
 best interests of human kind. Was not their isolation or their idiosyn- 
 crasy a species of selfish ambition to win a saintship in Heaven or a 
 crankship on earth ? What has the world benefited by those other much- 
 lauded contented beings, who want little, and have their want, and care 
 nothing for the abundance of others, and are merry and gay the livelong 
 
 day, without a care for to-morrow, without a pang for the lost opportunity 
 of yesterday, without provision for the time when they shall be no more, 
 without any other final request than 
 
 " Cover my head with turf or a stone, 
 It is all one, it is all one." 
 
 To be sure they have enjoyed their life; but so do the cattle in the field. 
 And they have enjoyed it with not a few of the products of other men's 
 ambitions. They have never spelled their names Moses or Jesus or 
 Mohamed. They have never turned immortal epics, or chiselled immor- 
 tal gods and goddesses, or reared over them proud temples and mighty 
 palaces. They have never started out as pioneers into unknown lands, 
 
 or ventured into the untrodden fields of scientific research. They have
 
 never answered to the name of Gutenberg or Watt, of Stephenson or 
 Pulton, of Franklin or Edison. No emancipated slaves ever stammered ' 
 before them their gratitude; no freed nations and peoples ever bedewed 
 their graves with their tears, or raised towering monuments over them 
 in grateful recognition of their noble services. 
 
 Fortunately the world has not many such sometimes I question- 
 whether it has any at all that are of sound mind and capable of lending 
 
 their fellowmen a helping hand. Be a man of thought 
 
 ,. . 6 Doubtful 
 and energy and you can as little help being ambitious as whether unam- 
 
 you can help thinking. There is that in you that must ^^ s P e P le 
 out; you can stop it only at your peril. You must have 
 an ideal to strive for, a hope to live for, a goal to aim at. Your contented- 
 days cease with your childhood become a man, and 
 
 " Gliicklicher Saugling! dir 1st ein unendlicher Raum noch die Wiegev 
 Werde Mann, und dir wird eng die uneudliche Welt." 
 
 Schiller, Das Kind in der Wiege. 
 
 If you look up with thoughtful eye, there are the mysteries of nature with 
 their countless riddles to tempt your ambition to wrest the long-kept 
 secrets from Heaven itself, by means of patient vigils at night and painful 
 researches during the day. If down you look, there is the grave to tempt 
 a desire not to pass completely from the memories of the living after 
 death. If you look abroad, there are the wants and wrongs of humanity 
 to tempt your ambition to achieve something, which, while benefitting 
 your fellowmen, may enable you to think with Horace of old: " Non 
 omuls moriar" that you will not die altogether. If there is a spark of 
 manhood or womanhood in you, it will assert itself as ambition in spite 
 of you. It will show itself in your unceasing restlessness, in your discon- 
 tent with what you have acquired, in your planning, and scheming, and 
 reaching out after, something that shall be higher and better than what 
 you have achieved. .You will cry with Goethe for "More Light!" though 
 eighty -three years of noble service be behind you, and the shadow of death 
 already upon you. 
 
 Will our ambition make us happier? It may in one sense; and it. 
 may not in another. When nature planted that .instinct within us she 
 
 only thought of the happiness of humanity, not of the 
 
 Ambition does 
 individual. She intended that the individual should not necessarily 
 
 seek and find his happiness in the consciousness of toil- 
 ing for all mankind's good, present and future, and in the knowledge that 
 such toil by ambitious men in the past has enabled him to enjoy his 
 present advantages. It is a mistake to believe that men seek honor or 
 riches or power for the sake of deriving pleasure from it. It is done in 
 obedience to a law of nature, primarily on account of necessities which 
 life imposes, secondarily on account of the necessities which society 
 imposes. If a happiness is sought after by the ambitious other than the 
 gratification of their ruling passion, or such as naturally flows from health- 
 ful activity, they are liable to disappointment. The most ambitious men 
 have certainly been the unhappiest, as far as worldly pleasure goes. 
 Moses died this side of the promised laud, after a life of toil and vexation.
 
 Jesus died upon the cross, with a Latin mock-inscription over his head to 
 Serve as a warning against ambition. Columbus was carried home in 
 chains from the new world which he had discovered. Hannibal died of 
 the poison draught administered by his own hand. Caesar died from the 
 dagger-thrust dealt by his dearest friend. Napoleon died a conquered, 
 captive exile far from home. Bismark at Friedrichsruhe is brooding on 
 the ingratitude of kings. We envy kings, while kings envy beggars. 
 We envy the stars of the stage and the platform, while they perhaps curse 
 the day they first set foot upon it. We envy the stars of the professions, 
 while their ceaseless toils and worries and responsibilities make them 
 devoutly wish they had less of honor and more of the humbler people's 
 happiness. We envy the princes of the money marts, while they, the 
 ' ' poor in abundance "and the ' ' famished at a feast, ' ' wish we had all their 
 wealth, and they had our freedom from vexatious cares. We envy the- 
 honors and fortunes of the Hamans, while they lament and mourn and 
 are utterly miserable because some insignificant fellow is so uncivil as 
 not to bow before them. 
 
 That, with countless of such deterrent illustrations before us, it should 
 be difficult to find in civilized lands a true man or a true woman, whose 
 
 thought or action is not animated by this fire of ambition, 
 nmst b^ itiOUS WC this enticing tempter, this beguiling cheat, is no small 
 
 proof that we have but little choice in the matter, that 
 nature bids, and we must obey, must climb from ambition to ambition, 
 from toil to toil, from vexation to vexation, that the wheel of progress, 
 may roll on. 
 
 I have no need, therefore, to urge upon you to cherish ambition, to> 
 strive for fame and fortune, even in the face of disheartning difficulties. 
 
 You will do it without my telling, as you have done 
 w" d wnn iOUS hitherto. Nature has put you in the way of it on the 
 
 day of your birth, and the whole system of your training. 
 has kept you on it. The praises at home, the honors and prizes and 
 medals in school, the statues of celebrated men on the public squares, 
 their pictures on your walls, their biographies on your tables, the distinc- 
 tion the famous and the wealthy of your community enjoy, the satisfaction, 
 you enjoyed when you succeeded in downing a competitor or in out- 
 stripping a rival, or in starting some new and noble enterprise, have 
 made ambition almost as much of a necessary element of your intellec- 
 tual and social life as air and food are of your physical existence. 
 
 But a word or two might be profitably said in the way of warning 
 against excess of ambition. Keep the fiery steeds well in hand. Hold 
 
 your reins taut, or you are lost. The moment you lose 
 musSbe" We control over them, they control you, and dash off with 
 
 you either to wreckage of morals or to wreckage of life. 
 Learn to discriminate between noble ambition and evil covetousness. A 
 wide chasm separates the two. On the one side is honor, right, emulation, 
 blessing, on the other side is shame, wrong, avarice, crime, and the hor- 
 rible chasm between and below is strewn with the mangled corpses of 
 those who sought to bridge the two..
 
 It is this that the tenth commandment would teach us, and it is here 
 where it has a powerful lesson to teach. It objects not to ambition. It 
 opposes covetousuess. In the fostering of noble ambition it sees the 
 possibility of faithful compliance with all the preceding nine command- 
 ments. In the nursing of covetousness it sees half of the other com- 
 mandments in danger. L,et a man lust after his neighbor's belongings, 
 and he may make Mammon his God, he may murder, violate the sanc- 
 tity of his neighbor's home, steal, slander and perjure himself, in trying 
 to get by unlawful means what is not his own. 
 
 If your neighbor has what you too desire to have, get it in the 
 honorable way your honest neighbor got it. There are as many 
 
 good things vet to be had as ever were gotten. Not all 
 
 , Strive for noble 
 the discoveries have yet been made, not all the good aims with noble 
 
 words have yet been said, not all the great movements a 
 have yet been inaugurated, not all the earth's treasures have yet come to 
 light. But they have to be gotten. Mere envious longing, or revengeful 
 "brooding, without raising your hand or putting your best foot forward, 
 will never get you in honest possession of them. If they are not to be 
 had, then brood not over impossibilities, else covetous longings and 
 criminal feelings will enter your mind. Set your heart on other ambi- 
 tions, and you'll soon find others as good as those your neighbor has. 
 
 Before, however, you enter upon your new ambition measure your 
 aim by your strength. Aim high, but never attempt an eagle's flight 
 with a sparrow's wing. You will either drop exhausted, 
 
 or resort to tricks to attain your end. Better unfamed An eagle's flight 
 
 with a sparrow's 
 out honest in the valley beneath than a notonous marau- wing. 
 
 der on the mountain tops. 
 
 "Wohl besser ist's, ohn' Anerkennung leben 
 Und durch Verdienst des Hochsten werth zu sein, 
 Als unverdieut zum Hochsten sich erheben, 
 Gross vor der Welt und vor sich selber klein." 
 
 Bodenstedt, Mirza-Schaffy. 
 
 Before, however, you enter upon your new ambition weigh its pur- 
 pose. You may have the power of a giant yet the object may not 
 
 deserve the strength of a dwarf. The accidental posses- 
 
 ,. . , , ... .. ., . . , Use not a giant's 
 
 sion of a giant s strength is no reason for its being used strength giant- 
 giant-like in an unworthy cause. He that goes forth to 1^" unwor " 
 conquer the world for conquest sake, to slaughter the 
 nations to display power, or to gratify a lust of slaughter, may fill a page 
 in the world's history, but a bloody, an execrable page it will be, a page 
 as foul as that of Lucifer in Milton's epic, who to display his power, 
 and to gratify his thirst for ruling, thought it ' 'better to reign in hell than 
 serve in heaven." If great powers are yours, believe that they have been 
 given you for great and good works. Cherish a noble ambition with them, 
 and seek to attain it by noble means. Be right, and you need have no 
 fear of ultimate success. Few men fail who deserve success, who hero- 
 ically toil for it, who patiently wait for it And even if they fail, far bet- 
 ter is it to fail in the right than to succeed in the wrong.
 
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