In loving remembrance of John A. Ackermann MILR 78 from his sister Marsha E. Ackermann 71 and dedicated to the memory of their parents Edward A. and Lee Metzstein Ackermann. "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." Ga?NELLUNiyER9IYLlH?AFY CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 1924 079 781 682 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924079781682 JUDAISM WORLD'S Parliament of Religions COMPRISING THE PAPERS ON JUDAISM READ AT THE PARLIAMENT, AT THE JEWISH DENOMINATIONAL CONGRESS, AND AT THE JEWISH PRESENTATION Published by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations CINCINNATI EGBERT CLAEKE & CO 1894 Copyright, 1894, By RoBEET Clarke & Co. INTRODUCTION. When the idea of holding a Parliament of all Religions in connection with the World's Fair of Chicago was broached there was no denomi- nation that hailed it with greater enthusiasm than the Jewish. The first advocates of a universal religion had been Israel's prophets, and this movement was the first pronounced step to be taken in our West- ern World toward giving active expression to the glorious hope of the uniting of all men in the name of the one God. Individual voices in the various Jewish pulpits throughout the land were raised in jfcy and gratitude. The first ofiicial action, however, in the matter was taken at the meeting of the Central Conference of American Rabbis held in New York City, July 6-10, 1892, when the committee to whom had been referred the suggestions in the annual message of the President of the Conference included in their report the following paragraph : " We recommend, in reference to the Religious Congress of the Columbian Exposition, that after the matter has been given mature deliberation at the present session of the Conference, the Executive Committee of this Central Conference be given full power to act in con- junction with the committee already appointed by the Columbian Com- missioners." A number of suggestions were made as to what participation Judaism should take in the Congress, and the matter was disposed of by a resolution to the effect " that all matters concerning the World's Fair be referred to the Executive Committee, that all recommendations that the Executive Committee will have to make and all the reports of their transactions regarding the World's Fair be brought to the notice of a special session^of the Conference to be held in Washing- ton next December, in order to act in conjunction with the Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations." At the special session of the Conference held in Washington on the fifth of the following December, it was resolved to address a com- munication to the Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congre- gations which was to convene on the next day asking the co-operation and support of the Union in the execution of the idea of the repre- sentation of Judaism at the Parliament. Upon the receipt of this communication by the Council it was re- ferred to a Committee of Five consisting of Messrs. B. Bettman, (iii) IV INTRODUCTION. Julius Freiberg, Simou Wolf, and Revs. Dr. Joseph Silverman and Louis Grossman. This committee submitted the following report which was unanimously adopted : "To the Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations : Gentlemen : — Your Committee, to whom was referred the com- munication from the Central Conference of American Kabbis, peti- tioning this Council to co-operate with it in a proper presentation of Judaism at the Congress of Religions which will be held in Chicago, August, 1893, beg leave to submit the following : Inasmuch as all the religions of the world will be represented at the said Congress of Religions, and the Central Conference of Amer- ican Rabbis has taken the initiative for a proposed representation of Judaism in it. The subjects to be treated as follows : I. HiSTOpiCAL — (a) Subdivided into Biblical, Medissval, and Modern. (6) The history of Jevyish beliefs and the customs in the various lands and times. (c) The history of the domestic and inner social life of the Jews in the various periods. (d) A history of the education of the Jewish people, public and private. II. Ethical — (a) Biblical ethics from the historical stawdpoint. (6) Talmudical ethics based upon and to begin with the Hellen- istic literature. (c) Ethics of the mediaeval Rabbis down to our own time. III. Polemics and Apologetics — That is, the relation of the Jews to Heathenism, Christianity, and Islam. IV. Statistical — (a) An estimate of the present statistics. (b) European statistics. (c) American Jewish statistics. (d) Eastern Jewish statistics. V. AeCHjEOLOGICAL — Religious and national both as to results and desiderata. These various topics will be assigned to well-known scholars who have made these branches their special study and they shall be requested to participate in person, or if that be impossible, by literary contributions. Furthermore, we recommend that the Conierence IKTRODUCTION. V should tender a special invitation to representative men and women to take part. Furthermore : Whereas, The anti-Semitic agitation, undeterred by the verdict of the enlightened, still continues its unjust hostility in many lands, be it Resolved, That besides the discussion of the topics recommended, we solicit the co-operation of all American Jews in sympathy with the cause, both individuals as well as societies, orders, and congrega- tions to render the participation of the Jews in the Religious Con- gress of the Columbian World's Exposition a matter of international importance, to help to state clearly and emphatically the great aim and the objects of Judaism before the entire world and to substan- tially refute all the slanderous charges made against it through the successive ages by its declared foes ; be it also Resolved, That men of renowned, world-wide scholarship and im- partiality of the Christian denomination and Jewish scholars of note be requested and authorized, at the expense of the American Jews, to write and publish exhaustive treatises on the anti-Semitic charges, in particular in regard to the blood accusations, which fill so dark a chapter in Jewish and Christian history, stating the facts and giving the result of their examination in decisive and clear terms. Further- more, be it Resolved, That these men be invited to come and to review pub- licly these charges before the enlightened representatives of the great religions of the world, in order to elicit the approval and assent of the world and silence slander in the name of humanity forever, at least within the pale of civilization. In all of which the Council fully concurs and heartily indorses the proposed plan. We recommend that this Council appoint a committee of eleven to co-operate with the Executive Committee of the Conference, and that the joint Commission be intrusted with full power to carry out this suggestion, with such modification as they may see fit for the proper representation of Judaism in the Congress, and that it shall convene as speedily as practicable, and furthermore, that the Execu- tive Board be herewith authorized to provide such financial support to the Commission as may be necessary for the execution of the plan." The suggestions in this report as to the subjects which should be treated in the papers to be read were adopted by the committee from the communication of the Conference. At the New York meeting above referred to, this plan had been presented. VI , INTRODUCTION.' In accordance with this resolution, the President of the Couucil, Mr. Emmanuel Werthheimer, appointed the committee of eleven, con- sisting of the following gentlemen : B. Bettman, Cincinnati, 0. Isidore Bush, St. Louis, Mo. Josiah Cohen, Pittsburg, Pa. Solomon Hirsch, Portland, Oregon. Adolph Moses, Chicago, 111. Simon W. Kosendale, Albany, N. Y. Jacob H. SchifT, New York. Lewis Seasongood, Cincinnati, O. Oscar S. Strauss, New York. Mayer Sulzberger, Philadelphia, Pa. Simon Wolf, Washington, D. C. Julius Freiberg, Cincinnati, O., President of the Union of A. H. C, ex-offieio. On March 26, 1893, a joint meeting of the Commission, consisting of this Committee of the Union, the Executive Committee of the Central Conference, the local committee of Chicago, and representatives of the Congress of Jewish women, was held in the parlors of the Audito- rium Hotel, and on the succeeding days in the vestry-rooms of tlie Anshe Maariv Congregation. An organization of all these bodies was effected. Mr. B. Bettman was chosen chairman of the meeting and Rabbi Joseph Stolz, secretary. The joint committee resolved to spread broadcast the following preliminary address, which states briefl)' and clearly the reasons why Judaism should be represented at the Parliament : "In accordance with the authority vested in us by the World's Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Exposition, we, the un- dersigned, representing the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Local Committee on a Jewish Church Congress, send fraternal greetings to the Jews and friends of the Jews of all countries. The World's Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Ex- position has formally and officially invited the professors of Judaism to be represented in the Parliament of Religions to be held in the Me- morial Art Palace from September 11th to September 28th, and it behooves us to participate in this Congress of all living historical re- ligions, that no link in the chain be missing, and the evidence be as complete as possible, that however manifold our titles may be, the be- lief's, the hopes, the aims we all cherish in common are much more INTRODUCTION. Vll important and essential than a long-standing and deep-rooted intoler- ance has led mankind to believe. Another reason of not less importance urges the Jews to be prop- erly represented at this Congress. Although the history of Judaism covers a period of more than three thousand years, no religion has been more thoroughly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Misconcep- tions of it are so deeply rooted that ours is still the humiliation to see the most enlightened nations of the world- not only giving credence to beliefs concerning us that have been invented by fanaticism, and have not the slighest historical foundation, but even persecuting our breth- ren upon the strength of them. Since the existence of our religion, no such opportunity as this has ever been extended to the Jew to set himself right before the whole world. It would, therefore, be criminal negligence did we not embrace this chance to proclaim broadcast, through such men as by their learning, their ripeness of judgment, tljeir character, and their works, will command general recognition and attention, what our fun- damental doctrines, hopes, and aims have ever been, what are the chief spiritual contributions for which humanity is indebted to us, what is our attitude toward other religions, and in what respect Juda- ism is still indispensable to the highest civilization. For these reasons, we beg leave to invite your moral support and hearty co-operation in this representation of Judaism for which the evenings of September 13th, 15th, and 16th have been assigned to us by the General Committee. It is designed by the Auxiliary that also a Denominational Con- gress or Conference shall be held in Chicago for a more complete and extended presentation and discussion of such theoretical and practical questions as concern each denomination ; and we herewith extend to you a hearty invitation to attend and participate iu the sessions of our Denominational Congress, which will be held under the auspices of the Central Conference of American Eabbis during the week begin- ning August 28th, and which will form an officially recognized part of the World's Fair Religious Congresses. All communications may be addressed to Rabbi Joseph Stolz, Secretary of the Joint Committee, 412 "Warren Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. Signed by — B. Bettmann, Cincinnati, President. Hon. Jacob H. Schipp, New York, Vice-President Adolph Moses, Chicago, Vice-President. Julius Feeibeeg, Cincinnati, Vice-President. Vlll INTRODUCTION. IsiDOE Bash, St. Louis, Vice-Prenident. Hon. Solomon Hiesch, Portland, Ore., Viee-President. Judge Simon W. Rosendale, Albany, N. Y. Hon. Oscae S. Steauss, New York. Hon. Simon Wolf, Washington, D. C. JosiAH Cohen, Pittsburg, Pa. Mayer Sulzberger, Philadelphia. Gen. Lewis Seasongood, Cinciunati. Babbf Isaac M. Wise, Cincinnati. Eabbi David Philipson, Cincinnati. Eabbi Charles Levi, Cincinnati. Rabbi Joseph Silverman, New York. Rabbi Tobias Shanpaeber, Baltimore. Rabbi Emil G. Hiesch, Chicago. Rabbi Isaac S. Moses, Chicago. Rabbi Joseph Stolz, Chicago, Secretary. Joint'iCommittee of the World's Congress Auxiliary on the Jewish Denominatimial Congress." The committee appointed by the chairman to prepare the program for the Denominational Congress and the Jewish Presentation at the Parliament submitted a report which was substantially carried out. The Denominational Congress convened Sunday afternoon, August 28, in the Hall of Columbus, and continued its sessions until Wednes- day morning, August 30th. The Jewish Church presentation took place on the evenings of the 13th and 15th during the sessions of the Parliament. Mr. B. Bettman, the chairman of the joint committee, in his official report, presented to the executive committee of the Union, at its meeting held in Cincinnati, December 10, 1893, writes of the pro- gram and the manner in which it was carried out : "This plan provided for a presentation of the cause of Judaism before the World's Congress of Religions and for papers to be read before the Jewish Denominational Congress, prepared by men selected from among the best aud ripest Jewish scholars in the United States, and the results have exceeded the highest expectations of the warmest friends of the movement. Not only did Judaism for the first time in its history meet the other Religions of the World as an acknowledged equal entitled to and accorded a respectful hearing, but the brilliant presentation of its cause has made warm friends for it in hitherto hos- tile or at least coldly inditlerent circles, and seed has been sown that will undoubtedly briug forth a harvest of esteem and good fellowship. INTRODUCTION. In addition its own champions and adherents have gained in confidence and encouragement, and another great cause for congratulation is in the eminent success achieved also for the first time by the American Jewish women in their exceedingly able public participation in the work of the Congress, which has resulted in conferring great honor upon themselves and the sacred common cause.'' At this same meeting, the following communication addressed by the Rev. Dr. Isaac M. Wise to Mr. B. Bettraan, on November 7, 1893, was presented : " Herewith I haive the honor to report to the Commission of the U. A. H. C, over which you preside, that the members of the Cen- tral Conference of American Rabbis and others associated with them have done their duty in the Congress and Parliament of all Religions, and have done it well. Judaism has been represented on this occasion fairly, fully, and frankly by able and eloquent champions, although none of the foreign brethren appeared. Also that cruel " blood ac- cusation " was emphatically and effectually refuted — I dare say by our influence — by the great Catholic Archbishop of Zante in Greece, who • declared it a base falsehood in Parliament. In the same manner anti- Semitism was denounced by Archbishop Ireland and others in both cases much better than we could have done it. We discussed fully all departments of Judaism, theoretical and practical, exactly according to plan and specification indorsed by your Commission at the meeting in Chicago. None of our men hitherto asked any recompense, traveling ex- penses, any thing at all, and no foreigner gave us the honor, conse- quently no draft on the $1,000 was made to the best of my knowl- edge. Therefore, I ask of the Commission (1) to otder the inclosed bills of the Secretary paid, to which I have, to add $50 for printing done on my order in preparation for the Congress and the Parliament. (2) The balance to be applied in the publication of the book which shall contain'(a) all transactions in connection with this affair; and (6) all papers and addresses by our people, men and women in that Con- gress and Parliament, together with those of the two archbishops men- tioned. This volume — I judge to be about 300 pages octavo — to be dis- tributed thus: One volume to the archives of the Union, the College and every congregation of the Uuion A. H. C. One volume to each of the officers connected with the Congress and' Parliament, to our writers whose presentation is in the volume, and to every member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis together about 300 X INTRODUCTION. volumes. . 100 to be distributed in the various libraries of the coun- try ; 100 among the leading newspapers, and 100. in Europe, together 600 volumes. No less than 1,500 to' be printed, and the balance to be sold for the benefit of the Union. This publication will be the historical monument of the occasion, and for the future generations of American Israelites, to tell so we were, so we did, and so we stood in 1893." A committee, consisting of Messrs. B. Bettman, A. A. Kramer and Alfred Seasongood, -was appointed to take these suggestions into consideration, with power to act. It is due to the generosity of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, through its Executive Committee, that the publica- tion of this volume has been made possible. It is sent forth as a me- morial of Judaism's participation in the greatest religious gathering that the world has ever seen. The thanks of the Jews of this land are due to the public spirit of the officers of the Union, who have placed the funds for the publication of the work at the disposal of the committee. There have been gathered, as far as possible, all the papers thati were read at the Parliament proper, the Congress, and the Presenta- tion. With but few exceptions, all the papers read are given. Where this is not the case, the 'committee, although making every effort to obtain the paper, did not succeed. It had also been intended to include the papers read at the Jewish Women's Congress in this volume, but the committee, much to its re- gret, learns that it has been anticipated in this matter by the Jewish Publication Society of America, which has made all arrangements to issue the proceedings of the Women's Congress. A number of the papers read before the Parliament, although not appointed by the joint commission, have nevertheless been included, in order that as complete an account as possible of what was spoken by the Jews on Judaism might be given. The paper of Professor D. G. Lyon, of Harvard University, on "Jewish Contributions to Civilization," has been included, because of its bearing on the subject. The strong words of the Archbishop of Zante on the blood-accu- sation, doubly important when the speaker who uttered them is con- sidered, are reproduced. The remarks of Archbishop John Ireland on Anti-Semitism, made at a meeting of the Jewish Women's Congress, and kindly furnished by their author for publication in this volume, will be welcomed as INTRODUCTION. XI the expression of a broad and liberal-minded man upon a movement which calls for the condemnation of all friends of humanity. This volume is sent forth with the prayer that it may serve toward spreading a knowledge of the past achievements, the present beliefs, and the future hopes of Judaism. These hopes center in the realiza- tion of the ideal of the Parliament of Religions, the acknowledgment of the Fatherhood of God, and the Brotherhood of Man. It was a rabbi who suggested the verse of the prophet that was adopted as the motto of the Parliament: " Have we not all one Father ? has not one God created us?" May God speed the coming of the time when the thought implied in these words will be realized, and, the world over, the high hopes aroused by the Parliament be fulfilled. CONTENTS. PAGES Introduction iii Opening Session. I. THEOLOGY. 1. An Introduction to the Theology op Judaism, by Rev. Dr. Isaac M. Wise. A Prolegomenon. What Theology is. The Postulates of The- ology. The Divine Names in the Bible. What the Theology of Judaism is. God and His Names according to the Torah. The Attributes of God. The Doctrines of the Theology of Judaism 1-25 2. Syllabus op a Treatise on the Development op Religious Ideas in Judaism since Moses Mendelsohn, by Dr. G. gottheil. Reform as a conscious change of existing conditions or beliefs. Reformed Judaism originated in Germany, but was consist- ently carried out in America. The influence of Mendelsohn. History of Reformed Judaism. The doctrines and tenets commonly believed by Reformed Jews, Reformed Judaism a new Judaism 26-34 3. The Sabbath in Judaism, by Dk. B. Felsenthal. Origin of the Sabbath. History of the Sabbath institution among the Jews. The place of the Sabbath in Jewish life. The celebration of the Sabbath in this country shall be left to the individual 35-41 4. What the Hebrew Scriptures Have Wrought por Mankind, BY Dk. Alexander Koiiut. Faith, the corner-stone of human civilization, bequeathed to the world by the Jews. The sciences and the arts were cul- tivated on the soil of ancient Judea. But principally it is through their religion that the Jews have influenced man- kind 42-48 5. The Doctrine of Immortality in Judaism, by Rabbi Joseph Stolz. . The assertion that the ancient Jews did not believe in eternal life refuted. Proof from the consensus gentium, notably from (xiii) XIV CONTENTS. PAGES early Semitic beliefs; from Scriptural evidences; from the post-Biblical development of Jewish doctrine; from apocry- phal and later Jewish sources. The subject of eternal pun- ishment '.'. 49-55 / 6. Judaism and the Science of Comparative Religions, by Rabbi Louis Grossman, D.D. The difficulty of stating the beliefs of a community or age. What the history of theology amounts to. All institutions are compromises. Religion not final, unalterable. The term revelation misleading. Intense dogmatism in Judaism un- known. Diflferences of opinion rather refer to church policy ; not even the Bible enjoys final authority among Jews. In spite of the unhampered freedom given to individuals, Juda- ism has maintained a marvelous identity. Religion chiefly a sociological fact; the spirit of Judaism is best realized in the domestic virtues of the Jewish people^ The new science of comparative religions sees God every-where; Judaism may readily accept its teachings. Judaism is bound up with the Jewish mind. Judaism respects history; it is the soul, of Jewish history 56-71 7. The Function of Phayek According to Jewish Doctrine, by Rabbi I. S. Moses. Freedom, Unity of God, Righteousness, Peace — elements of Jewish prayer. Universality of the Jewish prayers 72-78 8. A Review OF THE Messianic Idea from the Earliest Times to THE Rise of Christianity, by Dr. I. Schwab. Origin of the Messianic Idea. Germs reach as far back as the ninth century B. C. The process of development of the idea. Pre- and post-exilic conceptions as to a Messiah, nota- bly at the time of the birth of Christianity. The Messianic idea an archetype of American civilization 79-95/' II. ETHICS. 9. The Ethics of Judaism, by Dr. I. M. Wise. Ethics or Morals defined. The. Moral Law in man. The maxim to regulate the action. The advisory authority for the sake of certitude '. 99-106 10. Ethics of the Talmud, by Dr. M. Miblziner. Talmudical Ethics based on Biblical Ethics. Man as a Moral Being. Free will. Duty of self-preservation, self-cultivation, acquiring knowledge, and industriousnfess. Justice, truthful- ness, peaceableness, and charity. The absence of asceticism. A summary 107-113 CONTENTS. XV PAGES 11. Synagogue and Chi/rch in Their Mutual Relations, Partic- ularly IN Reference to the Ethical Teachings, by Dr. K. KOHLER. Synagogue and Church represent refractions of the same truth. Synagogue a creation of the Hasidim. Early Christianity based on the teachings of the, Essenes, incorporated fully in the Sermon on the Mount. The true character of Jesus. The early Church. Mission of Church and Synagogue compared. The higher outlook. The Church Universal 114-126 I 12: Universal Ethics op Prop. Heymann Steinthal, by Rabbi Clipton H. Levy. Introduction. Ethical doctrines of Ideas. Presentation of Ideas or the forms of new life. The psychological medhanism of ethical processes. The ethical view of the world 127-146 13. Reverence and Rationalism, by Maurice H. Harris, A. M., Ph. a. Fear succeeded by awe. Religion is a Weltanschauung combined with reverence. Reverence, not fear, the controlling influ- ence in Judaism. Outward forms of reverence must be kept distinct from the inner, reverential attitude of the soul. Ceremonialism not worse than official reverence. Revolt against organized religion. Rationalism. Reverence may be combined with a rational interpretaion of the universe. The claim of the soul must be vindicated 147-158 14. The Greatness and Influence of Moses, by Dr. G. Gottheil. . Moses, the liberator, tiie legislator, the moral teacher 159-163 15. Human, Brotherhood as taught by the Religions based on the Bible, by Dr. K. Kohleb. The Brotherhood of Man. The Fatherhood of God the basis of man's brotherhood 164-171 ; III. HISTORY. [- 16. The Share op the Jewish People in the Culture op the Various Nations and Ages, by Gotthabd Deutsch, Ph.D. Jewish ideas in the New Testament. Jewish-Alexandrian Phi- losophy. The Jewish-Arabic Period. Biblical Criticism. The age of reformation and Kabbala. Spinoza. Jews in the present age 175-192 17. Contribution op the Jews to the Preservation of the Sciences IN THE Middle Ages, by Dr. Samuel Sale. Bible Criticism and Exegesis. Grammar. Medicine. Travel. Poetry. Astronomy. Philosophy 193-203 XVI CONTENTS. PAGES 18. Historians op Judaism, by Rabbi H. Sciikeib'ek. History of Judaism. Jews and Judaism. , Historians of the Jews and of Judaism. The modern historians 204-229 19. Orthodox ok Historical Judaism, by Rev. Dr. H. Pereiea Mbndes. Ideas imparted to Moses. Mosaic code of ethics. Peace, brotherhood, happiness. Judaism and Zoroastrianism. Separateness of historical Judaism. "Worship rather than doubt. Judaism joined no heresies. Fruits, not foliage. Judaism always looks to God. Continue separating and protesting. Development of Judaism. Faith 2.30-240 (,20. The Position of Woman among tj-ie Jews, by De. Max Lands- bebg. The position of woman in biblical, mediseval and modern times..241-254 IV. STATE AND SOCIETY. 21. Judaism and the Modern State, by Rabbi David Philip- son, D.D. The modern state differing from ttie medifeval state. Emanci- pation of the Jews. Position of the Jews in regard to the state. In this country 257-267 / 22. Judaism a Religion, and not a Race, by^ Rabbi A. Mosbs. ^' The Aryan race. The Semitic race. The purity of the Jewish race 268-284 21. Popular Errors about the Jews, by Rabbi Joseph Silver- man, D.D. Popular errors about the Jews analyzed and refuted. The es- tablishment of a literary bureau for the purpose of refuting false charges recommended 285-294 [ 24. The Outlook of Judaism, by Miss Josephine Lazarus. " Salvation may yet again be of the Jews." 295-303 25. What has Judaism done for Woman? by- Miss Hj;nrietta Szold. Woman's place in Jewish life and doctrine illustrated from Bi- ble and post-biblical literature 304-310 V. ORGANIZED FORCES. 26. A Sabbath-Sciiool Union, by Dr. S-. Hecht ■ 313-318 27.' On Instruction in the Post-Biblical History of the Jews in OUR Sabbath Schools, by Dr. B. Felsenthal 319-326 CONTENTS. XVll PAGES 28. The Jewish Publication Society op America, by Miss Henki- ETTA SZOLD 327-333 29. Teainixg Schools, by Professor G. Baiibekger 334-338 30. Personal Service, by Dr. A. Gutmax 339-341 31. Popular Lectures, by Dr. A. JM. Radin 342-347 32. Union of Young Israel, by S. L. ICldridgb 348-352 J 33. What Organized Forces can do for Judaism, by' Rabbi Henry Beekowitz, D.D 353-357 ^ 34. The Social Settlement, by' Professor Charles Zeublin 358-361 ^ 35. Relief Societies, by Me. Henky L. Frank 362-363 VI. GENERAL. 36. The Voice of the Mother of Religions on the Social Ques- tion, by Rabbi H. Berkowitz, D.D. Dignity of labor. Responsibility of the individual for society, and of society for the individual. A human brotherhood under the care of a divine Fatherhood — the highest ideal of society. Freedom of the individual. The Mosaic-Talmudic institutions and laws of untold worth to the present in the solution of the social question 367-372 / 37. The Genius of the Talmud, by Dr. Alexander Koi-iut. A description of the Halakha and Haggadha 373-385 ^ 38. Elements of Universal Religion, by De. Emil G. Hiesch. Religion a natural function of the human soul. Religious sys- tems pretending to universality. The Church Universal will have no creed, but will have much more of God than the dogmatists have. Maimonides quoted. Character and conduct— the Gospel of the Church of Plumanity. Sin— a moral imperfection. Duty of labor. Religion will penetrate into all the relations of human society. Distinction be- tween secular and sacred wiped away. A life worthily spent here will be the best preparation for heaven. Prayer and Worship. "Religion made the Bible, not the book re- ligion." The Church of God 386-390 ^ 39. Jewish Contributions to Civilization, by Professoe D. G. Lyon. The Jew has given us the Bible, a library of ethics and relig- ion. The Jew has taught us the doctrine of God's Unity and His Fatherhood, of human brotherhood, of the dignity and immortality of the soul, of the golden age before us. XVIU CONTENTS. pa(;es The Sabbath as a religioufs institution we owe to the Jew. Jesus was a Jew ; Christianity and the Cluircli are Jewish institutions. The Jew has bequeathed to the world the highest ideals of life 391-407 40. Introdttctjon to a Bibliography of the Jewish Pkriodical Press, by De. Isaac M. Wise. The origin of the Jewish periodical press, its character and in- fluence , 402-409 . 41. The Archbishop of Zante on the Bi.ood Accusation 410 42. Remarks on Anti-Semitism, by Archbishop John Ireland 411-413 JEWISH DENOMINATIONAL CONGRESS. THE OPENING SESSION. On the twenty-seventh day of August, in the Hall of Columbus in the Art Palace, in the presence of a highly interested audience, the Jewish Denominational Congress opened its sessions. It was the first of the many denominational congresses held in connection with the Parliament, and the general feeling seemed to be that it was par- ticularly appropriate that the key-note of the Parliament should be struck by the mother of monotheistic religions. The exercises opened with prayer by Rabbi I. L. Leucht, of New Orleans, La., as follows : Almighty and most merciful God, Sovereign of the Universe! Deeply impressed with the solemnity of this moment, we approach Thee and crave for Thy blessing. Thou art the source of all wisdom, the light of our soul is but a spark borrowed from Thy glory, lead- ing us to heights, where Thou alone reignest supreme. O Father, we stand in need of that divine light shedding a ray of hope into the darkness of our mundane existence, tliat we may not be engulfed by tiie waves of selfishness and earthly glory, that we may find fortitude and faith in times of danger and pain, in hours of doubt and infidelity, enabling us, O Lord, to proclaim at all times that Thou art our God — and without Thee there is no salvation. O God, of all nations, the children of all peoples have come hither to prove the wonders of human achievements, to show forth the treasures of the earth, and now they do assemble to acknowledge that they have not forgotten the Giver of all, proclaiming each, in his own tougue, that Thou art the King of all Kings, the Ruler of the world, the Preserver of all things. The first called to emphasize and to acknowledge, before the world, eternal fidelity and allegiance to Thee, great God, comes Israel. Father, from the beginning of our pilgrimage Thou hast en- (xix) XX JEWISH DENOMINATIONAL CONGRESS. trusted US with this mission, to walk before tlie peoples of the earth proclaiming Thy truth and Thy unity. Prom Abraham, the father of all nations, to Moses, Thy trusted servant, even to this day, we have never ceased to cry aloud, " Thou, Jehovah, art our strength." Every age has heard this cry, its echo vibrates throughout all lands, and from every mountain top thrilled the message, " Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God ; the Lord is One." Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for this great day, when ful- fillment draws near — when all lands join in that great hymn of praise and thanksgiving, whose every verse is but a chord of that grand an- them, lifting all mankind to the same iuspiralinn, the same father, the same ideal, the same God, who knows but one justice, but one love. O God, let this gathering — only the beginning of a grand divine service, such as the world never witnessed, be sweet incense in Thy sight. Help us, O Lord, in our endeavor of binding man closer to man, linking heart nearer to heart. O, let it be a mountain of the Lord, where all nations gather to praise Thee. Let it be a Sinai, from whose crest once more will resound the trumpets of Revelation — announcing to those near and far — Thy Unity and Thy Love for ever- more! Amen! Mr. Charles C. Bonney, President of the World's Congress Aux- iliary, and General President of the World's Congresses of 1893, thereupon delivered the address of welcome. Masters and Teachers of Israel, Officers and Members of the Jewish Denominational Congress bf 1893 : The providence of the God of Abra- ham, Isaac and Jacob, who created man in his own image, and gave him from Sinai's glory-crowned summit the law of a righteous life, has so ordered the arrangements for the Religious Coiigresses, to be held under the auspices of the World's Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Exposition, that, without any plan to that end, this Con-' gress of the Jewish Church is tiie first of tlie series. The month of August having been assigned for the Congresses on Engineering, Art, Government, Science, and kindred subjects, the month of September was set apart for the Congresses of that greatest department of the World's Congress work, the Department of Religion. For this reason many efforts were made to fix a later date for this Congress, but it was found impracticable to do so; and when the present date was finally settled, it was not then expected that place could be found for the ses- sions of the Congress in the Memorial Art Palace, but that one of the Chicago synagogues must be selected for them. But when the assign- OPENING SESSION. XXI merits of the August Congresses, which had the prior right to this week, were finally made, it was happily found that the Jewish Con- gress could be accommodated here where the other religious congresses' will be held, and the arrangements were, with much pleasure, accord- ingly changed. Thus the Mother Church, from which all the Christian denomina- tions trace their lineage, and which stands in the history of mankind as the especial exponent of august and triumphant theism, has been called upon to open the Religious Congresses of 1893. But far more important and significant is the fact that this ar- rangement has been made, and this Congress has been formally opened and welcomed by as ultra' and ardent a Christian as the world con- tains. It is because I am a Christian,' and the Chairman of the General Committee of Organization of the Religious Congresses is a Christian, and a large majority of that committee are Christians, that this day deserves to stand gold-bordered in human history, as.one of the signs that a new age of brotherhood and peace has truly come. We know that you are Jews, while we are Christians, and would have all men so, but of all the precious liberties which freemen enjoy, the highest is the freedom to worship God according to the dictates of conscience ; and this great liberty is the right, not of some men, but of all ; not of Christians only, but of Jews, and Gentiles as well. I desire from all men respect for my religious convictions, and claim for myself and mine the right to enjoy them without molestation ; and my Master has commanded me that whatsoever I would have another do to me, I must also do to him. What, therefore, I ask for myself, a Christian, I must give to you as Jews. Our differences of opinion and belief are between ourselves and God, the Judge and Father of us all. Through all the Sacred Scriptures of the Old Testament, we walk side by side, revering the creation ; journeying through the wilderness; chanting the psalms and inspired by the prophecies ; and if we part at the threshhold of the gospels, it shall be, not with anger, but with love, and a grateful remembrance of our long and pleasant journey from Genesis to Malachi. The supreme significance of this Congress and the others is, that they herald the death of Persecution throughout the world, and pro- claim the coming reign of civil and religious liberty. Religion ! Religion ! how many crimes have been committed in thy name! The crimes committed in the name of Liberty are but few in comparison. Against Religious Persecution, all the religions of the world XXU JEWISH DENOMINATIONAL CONGRESS. should be united and support each other with unfailing zeal. This is not saying that all religions are of equal worth. This is not saying that any one should yield one jot or tittle of his own peculiar faith. It is quite the contrary. For only when one is protected in his proper liberties, and can "act in freedom according to reason," can he prop- erly examine his own faith or that of his fellow-man. With perfect religious liberty, with comprehensive and adequate education, with a life according to the great commandments, mankind will come into closer and closer relations; into a better and better un- derstanding of their social, political, and religious differences, and the living power of the truth, guided by the sovereign providence of God, will more and more make the whole world one in human brotherhood and service, and finally in religious faith. Henceforth the leaders of mankind will seek, not for points of difference, but for grounds of union, striving earnestly to know the truth, that, the truth may make them free from the bondage of preju- dice and error, and more and more efficient in advancing the enlighten- ment and welfare of the world. With these .sentiments I welcome the Jewish Denominational Congress of 1893." This address, received with marks of the highest approval, was f )llowed by remarks introductory to the work of the Congress by the Rabbis Isaac M. Wise, of Cincinnati, Gustave Gottheil, of New York, and Emil G. Hirsch, of Chicago. The work of the Congress proper was thereupon begun by Dr. K. Kohler, who read his paper on "The Synagogue and the Church and their Mutual Relations with Reference to their Ethical Teachings," which will be found elsewhere iu this volume. THEOLOGY. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM. By rev. dr. ISAAC M, WISE. I. A PROLEGOMENON. The Theology of Judaism, in the opiuion of many, is a new aca- demic discipline. They maintain Judaism is identical with legalism, it is a religion of deeds without dogmas. Theology is a systematic treatise on the dogmas of any religion. There could be no theology of Judaism. The modern latitudiuarians and syncretists on their part maintain we need more religion and less theology, or no theology at all, deeds and no creeds. For religion is undefinable and purely sub- jective ; theology defines and casts free sentiments into dictatorial words. Eeligion unites, and theology divides, the human family not seldom into hostile factions. Psychology and history antagonize these objections. They lead to the conviction that truth unites and appeases, while error begets antagonism and fanaticism — error, whether in the spontaneous beliefs or in the scientific formulas of theology, is the cause of the distracting factionalism in this transcendental realm. Truth well defined is the most successful arbitrator among mental combatants. It seems, there- fore, that the best method of uniting the human family is to con- struct a well defined, rational, and humane system of theology, as free from error as possible, whicli will appeal directly to the reason and con- science of all normal men. Research and reflection in the field of Israel's literature and his- tory produce the conviction that a code of laws is not yet a religion. Legalism is but one side of Judaism. The underlying principles and doctrines are the essential Judaism ; these are the material to the theology of Judaism, and these are essentially dogmatic. You take Judaism as a philosopheme, it is certainly dogmatic. It is neither em- pirical, skeptical, nor critical, hence it must be dogmatic. If you take it as a body of principle, doctrine, and precept embodied in Holy Writ, it certainly has its fundamental truths which, if formulated in decreta or placita, are always dogmas. Let us consider a few particular points. The scriptures begin with an account of Ceeation. Expound this as you may, it always 2 THEOLOGY. centers in the proposition of the priority and superiority of a sub- stantial being — call it spirit, causative power, God, or by any other name — prior and superior to all material being and its modalities; and this, however formulated, is a dogma. The scriptures from the first to the last page advance the doctrine of DIVINE INSPIRATION AND REVELATION. Reason about it as you may, it always centers in the proposition : There exists a faculty of intercommunication between thdt universal, prior, and superior being and the individualized being called man ; and this also is a dogma. The scriptures teach that the Supreme Being is also Sovereign Providence. He provides sustenance for all that stand in need of it. He foresees and foreordains all, shapes the destinies and disposes the affairs of man and mankind, and takes constant cognizance of their doings. He is the law-giver, the judge, and the executor of his laws. Press all this to the ultimate abstraction and formulate it as you may, it always centers in the proposition of Die sittliche Weltordnung, the universal, moral theocracy, which is the base of all canons of ethics; and this again is a dogma. The scriptures teach that virtue is rewarded and vice punished, inasmuch as they are voluntary actions of man ; furthermore that the free and benevolent Deity under certain conditions pardons sin, in- iquity, and transgression. Here is an apparent contradiction between justice and grace in the Supreme Being. Press this to its ultimate ab- straction, formulate it as you may, and you will always arrive at some proposition concerning atonement ; and this also is a dogma. Furthermore, scriptures teach with special emphasis the Yhvh Monotheism. This is not the indefinite theo-monism of the primitive element worshipers, nor the illative monotheism of the Shemitic or Aryan paganism, supposed to underlie the polytheism of elemental astrolatry or anthropomorphous theology. ' It has nothing in common with any god or gods made by human hand or fancy ; nothing in common with the abstract deities or god-ideas of philosophy, ancient or modern, which are metaphysical postulates without substantial ex- istence ; nor with the artificial god or gods of inductive speculation, like Hegel's perpetually self-developing " Geist," which is the original of the Darwinistic and Auguste Comte^s metaphysics; nor with the "Will" of Schopenhauer, the "Unconscious" (i)as Unbewusste) of Ed. von Hartmann, the subsequent "Panlogism," or "Panpsychism," and the last phase of the whole, the " Unknowable" of British specu- lation. It is a unique Yhvh monotheism without precedent or parallel in history which scriptures teach, a belief in an eternal living God, the author, preserver, and governor of the entire cosmos. THE THEOLOGY OP JUDAISM. 3 -who possesses, enlivens, and permeates the All without being sub- merged in, changed, or limited by this All, the self-conscious wisdom and benevolence in the All, without any dependency on the All. " God is he that is, and all the rest but seems to be." This Yhvh monotheism is no philosopheme ; reason neither could nor did invent it, reason can not deny it, it can only construe it ; it is a dogma. And according to all ancient and modern expounders of scripture, it is a dogma on which depends the salvation of man. Therefore it is correct to maintain that Judaism has its dogmas; hence there may be built up a theology of Judaism. Whether it is necessary to formulate and establish these, other, or in fact any dogmas, in order to construct a system of theology, can be decided only after we have ascertained what theology is, what the theology of Judaism is.* 2. WHAT THEOLOGY IS. Theology is the science of man's religious knowledge. Science is ratiocinated and systematized knowledge. Knowledge is any conception of fact, phenomenon or sentiment made permanent in consciousness. Man's religious knowledge is the complex of con- ceptions of facts, phenomena or sentiments concerning the Supreme Being of his own cognition, that Being's nature and commandments, man's duties, hopes or fears accordingly, and his relations to that Supreme Being. Since all religious knowledges center in man's cognition of the Supreme Being, the science of these knowledges is properly called theology, " a treatise or discourse on or of God." The ratiocination of conceptions and knowledge entering iuto any system of science is the work of the faculty of reason. This is the point where theology and philosophy meet, but only to separate again from each other at the next step in advance. Theology is no meta- physics, no ontology, no psychology and no philosophy of religion, consequently its operations and methods differ from all of them. ' We know that the attempt to formulate these dogmas by Moses Mairaonides and other authorities, before and after him, proved a failure. No two of them agreed in the numbers, essence or wording of the dogmas. Mairaonides himself in his philosophical book, Moreh iVefeMC^im— although his formulas were placed in the common prayer book of the synagogue — drops the last two, and in his Eabbinical code, Mishnah Thorah, emphasizes but two, viz: God and Revelation. See Yesode Hathorah i, and vii, 1 ; .Jo- seph Albo's Ikkarim. section 1 ; Isaac Abarbanel's Rosh Amanah and Chasdai Kreskas' Or Adonai, and compare first Mishnah of section Chelek in Sanhedrin. 4 THEOLOGY. Ratiocination signifies the generation of a judgment from others actually in our understanding. I compare the conception or knowledge to be ratiocinated with those I possess; if there exists nothing contrary or contradictory to it in my consciousness, I hold it to be true, true for me; it is subjectively true. The next higher step is, I compare this new conception or knowledge with the knowledge of mankind, with that which all men know, and if there exists nothing contrary to it in the consciousness of mankind, I hold it to be objectively true ; it is true with all rational beings. In theology, as in every other transcendental science, none can nor need go beyond this for ratiocination. Whatever all men ever knew to be true is true to all ; it is self-evident because it is evident to all. Theology can safely build its structure upon the universal knowl- edge of men. Philosophy in fact does the same. It can not produce facts or phenomena, or the conceptions of either. It can only reason on tliem, hypothetically determine the degree of possibility, or proba- bility, analyze, construct and define that which it has adopted from the universal knowledge' of mankind. JMankind knows much more tlian reasoners elaborated. Philosophy in these three thousand years elab- orated but a few problems which mankind's reason begets. In all this, however, it relied on mankind's knowledge more than on the syllogism. None can reason on naught. Knowledge precedes the process of rea- son and claims justly the priority in time aud superiority of evi- dence over all products of reason. Mankind's universal knowledge in each particular case is the conclusion of a syllogism, the antecedents of which the philosopher may or may not discover. 3. THE POSTULATES OF THEOLOGY. As far back into the twilight of myths, the early dawn of human reason, as the origin of religious knowledge was traced, mankind was in possession of four dogmas. They were always present in men's consciousness, although philosophy lias not discovered the antecedents of the syllogism, of which these are the conclusions. The exceptions are only such tribes, clans or individuals as had not yet become conscious of their own sentiments, those latter not yet having been crystallized into conceptions, in consequence whereof they had no words to express them ; but those are very rare exceptions. These four dogmas are : 1. There exists — in one or more forms — a Superior Being, living, mightier and higher than any other being known or imagined. (Ex- istence of God.) 2. There is in the nature of this Superior Being, and in the nature THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM. 5 of man, the capacity and desire for mutual sympathy, inter-relation and inter-communication. (Revelation and worship.) 3. The good and the right, the true and the beautiful, are desir- able, the opposites thereof are repugnan t to the Superior Being and to man. (Conscience, ethics, and sesthetics.) 4. There exists for man a state of felicity or suffering beyond this state of mundane life. (Immortality, reward, or punishment.) These four dogmas of the human family are the postulates of all theology and theologies ; and they are axiomatic. They require no proof, for what all men always knew is self-evident; and no proof can be adduced to them, for they are transcendent (trans conscientiam com- munern). Philosophy, with its apparatuses and n)ethods of cogitation, can not arrive at them, it can only expound them ; it can not negate them, and no reasoner ever proved such negation satisfactorily even to himself. All systems of theology are built on these four postulates. They differ only in the definitions of the quiddity, the extension and expan- sion of these dogmas in accordance with the progression or retrogres- sion of different ages and countries. They differ in their derivation of doctrine and dogma from the main postulates ; their reduction to practice in ethics and worship, forms and formulas ; their methods of application to human affairs, and their notions of obligation, account- ability, hope or fear. These accumulated differences in the various systems of theology, inasmuch as they are not logically contained in the postulates, are subject to criticism ; an appeal to reason is always legitimate, a rational justification is requisite. The arguments advanced in all these cases are not always appeals to the standard of reason — therefore the disa- greements — they are mostly historical. " Whatever we have not from the knowledge of all mankind, we have from the knowledge of a very respectable portion of it in our holy books and sacred traditions " — is the main argument. So each system of theology, in as far as it differs from others, relies for proof of its particular conceptions on its tradi- tions written or unwritten, as the knowledge of a portion of mankind ; so each parlicular theology depends on its sources. So also does Judaism. It is based upon the four postulates of all theology, and in justification of its extensions and expansions, its derivation of doctrine and dogma from the main postulates, its entire development, it points to its sources and traditions, and at various times also to the standard of reason, not, however, till the philoso- phers pressed it to reason in self-defense ; because it claimed the divine b THEOLOGY. authority for its sources, higher than which there is none. And so we have arrived at our subject : 4. WHAT THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM IS. We know what theology is, so we must define here only what Judaism is.* Judaism is the complex of Israel's religious sentiments RATIOCINATED INTO CONCEPTIONS IN HARMONY WITH ITS JeHOVISTIO God-cognition. These conceptions made permanent in the consciousness of this people form the substratum to the Theology of Judaism. They are recorded in the national literature of the Hebrews, and actualized in their history, which recorils also the temporary aberrations, the com- bat of the logical and illogical in the historical process. This definition of Judaism is justified by the Hebrew records. It is presupposed iu the opening chapters of Genesis, that the progres- sive development of the monotheistic religious knowledge in the human family was preserved by certain patriarchs — this is also the opinion of the Talmudical sages — and reached Abraham in the full- ness of its opulence. Abraham was in his time the heir and expo- nent of mankind's monotheistic traditions, or perhaps the most promi- nent of that favored class, who represented an esoteric faith, which Abraham "began to proclaim publicly in Canaan. It was a name- less faith. With Abraham begins the definite God of revelation. When this patriarch was ninety-nine years old, it is recorded. Genesis xvii. the first time in these records, God spoke to him of Himself, ex- pounding what He is: "I am Ail Shaddai, walk before me and be (become) thou perfect, and I will make my covenant between me and Ihee." Here is the first record of monotheistic religion, with its ob- ject, "to be (become) perfect," and its method, to walk before God, iu the light of God, to think and act God-like, to shape the moral conduct according to the God-idea, which is its ideal and pattern, and identical with the religious knowledges ratiocinated in harmony with the God-cognition. Four centuries of progressive development elapsed between the * Judaism is a misnomer for the religion of Israel. It applies only to that status of religion which was developed and established in Judea, i. e., to one phase of that religion, and especially the one which was developed from and after the revolution under the Asmoneans (167 B. C.) Still the word is so old, venerable and popular, that it can not well be replaced by its original designation, which is mH' HN")* "The fear, veneration, and worship of Jehovah (Psalm xix, 10), which endureth forever." THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM. 7 God-revelation to Abraham aud to Moses, characterized by the ethical height of Joseph, the faith and trust in God by the Elders of Israel in Egypt (Exodus iv, 27-31), and the prophetical powers of Moses. A new era of religion begins, it is the Mosaic dispensation. It begins n'ot with a legislation ; it begins with the revelation of God Himself to Moses (Exodus iv, 14-16). The God-coguition always precedes the embodiment of the religious idea into commandment and institution ; fur the God-cognition is the principle, first cause, and touchstone for all religious knowledges, ordinances, and institutions, all religious dog- mas and practices, all of which must be effects of that first cause, le- gitimate conclusions from that principle, sequences of that antecedent. The law of laws is, " Whatever is in ray cognition of God, is imperative in my religion ; whatever is contrary to my cognition of God, is irre- ligious and forbidden to me.'' Israel did not make its God, God made Himself known to Israel, and its entire religion grew out of this knowledge ; whatever is not in harmony with this principal knowledge is aberration, error. In Judaism, therefore, all religious sentiments must be ratiocinated into conceptions in harmony with its Jehovistic God-cognition. Therefore Israel's religion is called (1111' nXI* " Ven- eration and Worship of Jehovah ;" its laws and institutions are divine inasmuch as they are the sequence of this antecedent; and its ex- pounders maintain that this monotheism is the only dogma of Juda- ism. Its formula is "lIlN 'il 1J*n7K T? and its categoric Imperative, its law of laws, is ):hn dd'h'^k 'n nnx- The Theology of Judaism is the science of Israel's religious concep- tions, these being the doctrinal, ethical, and practical sequences following le- gitimately from the. one principle antecedent to them, which is Israel's Ood- cognition. Its evidence is in the four postulates of all theology, the universal knovvledge of mankind; in the revelations recorded in the Thorah, the universal knowledge of a large portion of mankind ; in the stand- ard of reason and the demonstration of history, to which it refers all doctrine not contained in the four postulates and in the Thorah.* ® Thorah signifies "T/ie teach ing," emphatically, even as the terra bihlia or Bible was adopted for "the book," emphatically; also the Canon, the Law, to direct authoritatively man's reason, volition, and action. The five books of Moses are the Thorah, the primary' sources of the "teaching and canon " of Israel's religion. The other books of Holy Writ are secondary sources, relating to the Thorah as commentaries by inspired men, as far as the "teaching and canon" are concerned; and all post-biblical writings on the "teaching and canon" as laid down in the Thorah and expounded in Prophets and Hagiographa, stand in relation to the Thorah as sub-corn- THEOLOGY. It consists of two main divisions : 1. God and His attributes as revealed in the Thorai. 2. The doctrinal, ethical, and practical sequences, following legiti- mately from this God-cognition. We shall begin by considering the first. 5. GOD AND HIS NAMES ACCORDING TO THE THOEAH. We approach this most important, most solemn and sublime problem with deep veneration and profound reflection. It is the grandest and most inscrutable of all thoughts and ideals of men ; it is God and his attributes we are to discuss. I only venture out upon this fathomless and boundless deep because I am to discuss this theme of the infinite under the limitation "according to the Thorah ;'' and the Thorah is a book, and a book may be understood correctly by an ordinary mortal, if his canon of exegesis harmonizes with the standard of reason. I have to lay down, in this connection, the following rules of ex- egesis : 1. The Thorah maintains that its "teaching and canon" are divine. Man's knowledge of the True and the Good comes to his rea- son and conscience (which is unconscious reason) either directly from the supreme and universal Reason, the absolutely True and Good ; or it comes to him indirectly from the same source by the manifestations of nature, the facts of history and his power of induction. This principle is in conformity with the second postulate of theology, and its extension in harmony with the standard of reason. 2. All knowledge of God and His attributes, the True and the Good, came to man by successive revelations, of ihe indirect kind first, which we may call natural revelation, and the direct kind after- ward, which we may call transcendental revelation ; both these reve- mentaries to the original text and its inspired expounders. This is the historical position of Judaism. Those Bible critics who maintain that the five books of Moses in the form before us were written after Prophets, must admit that the main "teaching and canon" existed traditionally or in any other form prior to the prophets and psalmists; or they must postu- late that inspired men of a later date abstracted from existent literature all " teaching and canon " and compiled it in this Thorah form ; or they must place themselves upon the non-Israelitish and non-historical standpoint ; for this is unexceptionally and incontrovertibly the historical Israelitish standpoint that the " teaching and canon " is in the Thorah, and it is there- fore called Thorah or more explicitly. niiT ITIID (Deuter. iv, 8; xvii, 11. 19; xxxi, 24. 25; xxxiii, 4; Psalm xix, 18. See the author's "Pronaos to Holy Writ"). THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM. 9 lations concerning God and His substantial attributes, together with their historical genesis, are recorded iu the Thorah in the Seven Holy Names of God,* to which neither prophet nor philosopher in Israel added even one, and all of which constantly recur in all Hebrew literature. 3. The term the God of Revelation is intended to designate God as made known in the transcendental revelations, including the successive God-ideas of natural revelation. His attributes of relation are made known only in those passages of the Thorah, in which He Himself is reported to have spoken to man of Himself, His name and His attri- butes, and not by any induction or inference from any law, story, or doing ascribed to Him anywhere. The prophets only expand or define those conceptions of Deity which these passages of direct transcendental revelation in the Thorah contain. There exists no other source from which to derive the cognition of the God of revelation. These passages are: Genesis xvii, 1, 2; Exodus iii, 6, 14. 15; XX, 1-5; xxxiii, 17-23; xxxiv, 5-10; Leviticus xix, 1. 2; Deuter. V, 6-10. Whatever is not predicated of God in these passages, none can predicate of Him. 4. God called in the Thorah by any of the seven holy names, or the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Fathers, the God of Israel, or by the prophets the God enthroned in Zion or Jerusalem, can not be understood to signify a tribal God, a national God, a local God, or any special God ; it could signify only the one God revealed to the fathers, or known and worshiped by them ; God revealed to Israel, known, worshiped, and proclaimed by Israel only, as all those revelations in the Thorah plainly and convincingly teach, the creator of heaven and earth, the judge of all the earth, the pos- sessor of heaven and earth, exalted above all, prior and superior to all matter, time, and space. He can not be supposed to be also a tribal, national, special, or localized God.f The prophets and hagiographeis never understood God otherwise than as the Eternal, Infinite, Absolute, hence Universal and Omnipresent God, the very highest, broadest, and deepest conception of Deity which human reason is capable of; and the prophets only knew of God and His attributes, what they ha^ TW 18 THEOLOGY. 7. mn* YEHOVAH. Yhvh, the tetragramruaton, the ineffable and perfect nomen pro- prium of the Absolute and Only God JJ^m^QH DSJ'i engraved upon the golden diadem of the high priest, is given in Scriptures to God only. It is the last and highest of the seven holy names, and contains, besides the new revelations, all the revelations of Deity in the six prior names of God. Concerning this name of God, it is reported in Ex- odus (iii, 15) that the Almighty himself said : " This is my name for- ever, and this is my memorial throughout all generations." The prophet Zachariah expressed this revelation thus : "And Yehovah. will be king over all the eaith, that day Yehovah will be one, and his name will be one." The Absolute is immutable and eternal, so must be his name, if it represents him. The etymology of the tetragrammaton is this: "It is purely He- brew. It is a contraction of the consonantal letters of the three tenses of the verb hawah, " to be," viz : n'H' mn hm " He was, he is, he will be." These are ten letters, viz., six let- ters n hai represented in the tetragrammaton by two H hai; three ♦ yud represented in the name by one, and the one 1 vav forming the niiT. The verb rnn signifies to be, to become, and to have. This is also the threefold signification of the tetragrammaton. 1. Yhvh is the Absolute Being, eternal, infinite, unconditioned, and immutable, all being besides him is relative, finite in time and space, conditioned, and mutable. He alone is self-existent and self- sufiicient; all other beings depend for existence on something outside of themselves, and are subject to genesis and katatesis. He is the necessary existence (niN'ifOn 2*1(10), and all things are as long as they exist, because He is. 2. Yhvh is the Eternal Becoming, as nothing could become from any source outside of the Absolute Being. His becoming power was manifested in the creation of the world. All possibilities potential in the world that have or will become realities, were ideally-actual in him in all eternity and remain so forever, as there can be no increase or decrease in the Absolute. Being and Becoming are but two aspects of the absolute and necessary being. 3. Yhvh is the absolute Having. He alone possesses himself; no relative being has or possesses itself; all are possessed by something outside of themselves. He possesses the All and all, they were in Him before they were in reality and remain in Him forever. He is TIIK THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM. 19 Y^a') D'OLi' njp " the possessor of heaven and earth " (Genesis xiv, 19), and no finite being possesses, not even itself. These three significations of the verb correspond to the three tenses represented in the tetragrammaton, as revealed to Moses (Ex- odus iii, 13-16). This is God and none besides him. None can think or imagine a being higher than the Absolute, two or more abso- lute beings in existence, or a world of beings without the Absolute as its cause or sustaining power. So far and no farther can reason pene-. trate into the mysteries of existence. The vocalization of the tetragammaton, it is maintained by Moses Maimonides (Moreh Nebuohim, part II, chapters Ixi and Ixii), was forgotten after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Leo di Modena, in his Minhaghai Haqqardim, p. 169, quoted by Basnage, Part II, Book 3, § 16, maintains that the Pharisees only forgot this vocaliza- tion, because they would not pronounce the tetragrammaton ; the Sad- ducees did pronounce the holy name, and did not forget it. The vowel signs in the Bible, it is further maiutained," were originally established by the Karaites, and they preserved the Sadducean tradi- tions. We must add to this, that the older names of God in Scrip- tures, Elohim, Elovah, Adonai, are vocalized like Jehovah, beginning with a Sheva and a Cholem, there is no good reason to consider this incorrect in the tetragrammaton. Least justifiable is the form Jahve which would make it a Hiphil, the verb havah in the causa- tive form, which would make of it "he who caused being,'' aud not " he who is himself the being absolute and eternal," as the prophets understood it (Isaiah, xliv, 6 ; xlviii, 12). 8. THE ATTRIBUTES OP GOD. Attribute ("INin) is any thing that can be predicated of another, and which is inherent in its nature or its substance. The Infinite necessarily presents an infinite number of attributes, and every one in itself must be infinite. It is evident, therefore, the attributes of the Absolute can not be enumerated, or any of them defined in any language. It is no Jess evident that we know the existence, substance, and nature of any thing by its attributes. It follows, therefore, that we have no knowl- edge of the Absolute, except by revelation, as is also the case with the Absolute or Infinite itself. We canpredicate no more of Yhvh than what He directly or indirectly revealed to Himself. To illustrate : The forces of nature, like the mental qualities of man, are unknown as to their substance. We obtain our knowledge of them by their manifestations. Change the terra of manifestation to 20 THEOLOGY. revelation — and they are synonymous — and yon will feel convinced that all we know of the Absolute and His attributes we know by revelation. Theology relies for its knowledge upon the universal knowledge of man — the four postulates — and its written or unwritten traditions, the knowledge of a large portion of humanity. The Theology of Judaism acknowledges the Thorah as the repository of its divine traditions ; therefore it can predicate of Yhvh only that which is either in the universal knowledge of man- or in the Thorah, reported there as God's direct manifestations of Himself. All attributes of God are expressed in the Thorah in the substan- tive form,* because in Him every thing is absolute, involved in the substance and unity of the necessary being. So also every attribute of relation in the Thorah is a verbal noun (1171^0/1 \t2 "ItJJ D^)- God and His attributes are one. They are expressed in the seven holy names of God, and then defined as attributes of relation in his deal- ings with humanity. In the seven names God is revealed as : (a) The absolute and necessary existence (rilN'^O)- (b) The absolute oneness (nnilK)- (c) The Eternal (nrnVJI mOTp). (d) The Omnipotence (nSlD»). (e) The Life (D^H). (f ) The Intellectus (110311). (g) The Goodness (HJ'JH). All other substantial attributes of the Deity, such as infiniteness, irannitability, omnipresence, providence and freedom, are logically con- tained in these seven. 9. HOLINESS. Between the two kinds of attributes there is one which character- izes especially the God of revelation ; it appertains both to the sub- stance and to the relation, and this is Holiness. God reveals Himself as JJ'Ilp- "And the Lord said unto Moses, saying: Speak unto all the congregation, the children of Israel, and say unto them : Ye shall be (become) holy, for holy (kadosK) am I, Jehovah, your Elohim." (Leviticus xix.) The prophet (Isaiah vi, 3) hears the Seraphim on high praise the Lord as threefold holy, which is to express the idea of most holy, holiness inexpressible in human language. This attribute ■ Compare also I Chronicles xxiv, 10-12, the grand benediction of King David. THE THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM. 21 of lioliiiess recurs continually in Holy Writ, and always in the sub- stantive form of KADOSH, and not in the adjective form of kodesh, after this special revelation to Moses. By this attribute of holiness the God of revelation is distinguished from all gods and God-ideas in the theology of the world. It represents Jehovah as the highest ideal of moral perfection, and it is made incumbent upon the congregation of the children of Israel to become holy, morally perfect. Here is the foundation of Yhvh ethics, which was known to Israel only. The term kadosh is the predicate of a being, in which all moral excellencies in the highest degree are united, and this is moral perfection. Holiness signifies not only to abhor the vicious, wicked, and false, but also to love the True and the Good, because they are true and good ; it is the generic term of utmost goodness, including justice, mercy, benevolence, the delight in the practice per se of all which is good, true, and pure, and the abhorrence of the opposite thereof. 10. yhvh's attributes of relation. These are revealed in the Decalogue and specified in the direct revelation to Moses recorded in Exodus xxxiv, 5-10. After the establishment of the covenant of God with Israel as a people and a revelation of the conditions contained in the Decalogue to be fulfilled by the covenant people, they rebelled, violated the main condition of the covenant by making and worshiping a god besides Yhvh, and forfeited their national existence, their "ornament from Mount Horeb" (ibid, xxxiii, 6) in the opinion and belief of Moses. Therefore he broke the two tables of stone, as the contract was broken, and moved his tent from the camp, as they were a cove- nant nation no longer. God, however, it is recorded there, pardoned also this rebellious transgression, and renewed his covenant with Israel under the same conditions. Moses could not understand how the great God of justice, of righteousness, the sovereign Adonai, " the judge of all the earth," should thus deal with a nation, and he prayed, " Let me know thy glory, let me know thy ways, I beseech thee, that I may know thee, and that I may find grace in thine eyes ; " or in other words, " that I may know how thou, God, governest nations, and by doing as thou doest, find favor before thee." God answered his supplication thus, "I will cause all my goodness to pass before thee, and I will proclaim (fully expound) the name of Yhvh before thee, how 1 am beneficent to whom I am beneficent and merciful to ■whom I am merciful." (ibid, xxxiii, 19.) Therefore he received the direct revelation, what Yhvh as the eternal Ail, immanent in 22 TH EOLOGY. nature and man, is to all human beings especially (ibid, xxxiv, 5, sqq.). He is: 1. The True and Incomparable Love — love without any motive aside of his own nature, which is the superlative of grace and truth. Language has no adequate term to express the love of God, which is so entirely different from what man calls love; therefore Scriptures employed five different terms to express it approximately. Love is first a sentiment, a feeling of kindly sympathy for any being whose nearness pleases and delights us. This is expressed in Bachuni^ (Dltll). Mercy is but one side of Radium and signifies that kindly sympathy for the object of our love in a state of suffering; Raehum signifies the constancy of that sympathy under all conditions. Love is secondly a desire to sustain, support, and to make happy the object of our sympathy in exact ratio to this sympathy. This is expressed in Chanun QMtl), the benevolent, beneficent bestower of all which gives sustenance, support, and happiness to the beings of His sympathy. Love, in the third place, is that unshaken and never-failing fidel- ity which adheres steadfastly to the object of its sympathy and never withdraws from it its benevolent beneficence, however it fails, falls, de- generates, until it becomes necessary to heal the fallen man by the infliction of punishment, and then it is done with sincere sorrow and regret. This is God's " long suffering " (D'3K "1"1N)- He abandons not the fallen sinner, individual, or nation ; permits not the consequence of sin — which is punishment — to overwhelm the sinner instantly, but affords him time for self-correction. f All this kindly sympathy, benevolent beneficence, and never-fail- ing fidelity, which are the three elements of love, can only then be called divine if the motive is pure goodness, unselfish, " free of every expectation and possibility of recompense." Such is the motive of Yhvh's love. He is the Supreme Goodness, the 1011 i") "Supreme Grace;" love is the attribute of his nature. In the term "long suffering" there is involved the idea of pun- ishment, which would seem contradictory to the supreme love ; this, however, is not the case if the punishment is intended for correction. Therefore this revelation continues, Yhvh is HON !3"l "Supreme ' Raehum in other Shemitic languages signifies "love," and appears in Holy Writ always in this signification as mercy, sympathy, or the like. t So this divine attribute is defined in Proverbs xiv, 17. 29 ; Psalms xxv, xxxii, li, Ixxxvi, ciii, cxlv; Isaiah Iv, 6-10; Jeremiah iv, 1. 2 ; Ezekiel xviii; Hospaxvi; Jonah iii, iv; Micah vii, 18-20; Talmud in Sanhedrin, -p. Ill, and elsewhere. THIC THKOLOGY OF JUDAISM. 23 Truth," truthfulness and justice, which is also an attribute of his nature. Sins must be puuished, wrongs must be riglued, God's law must be enforced and sustained for the preservation of mankind and the benefit of the individual. But all punishment inflicted on the transgressor is at the same time from the motive of Supreme Grace as it is from Supreme Truth. So this fifth tertn complements the defini- tion of the divine love, for which language has no word. 2. Yhvii's Supreme Love and Trnth revealed in the life of na- tions, in the process of history, is the object of the second part of this revelation. A nation is a complex or association of human beings. It must exist, develop, and prosper under the laws of a God as physical nature does, and stand the evil consequences of a deviation frotn these laws. These evil consequences are afilictiou, decline, and death. Nations die of their own sins. Man is a free agent, hence he may sin, deviate from the straight path of God's law, and this possibility must be in- cluded in God's law. Nations are composed of many such free indi- viduals; hence nations may sin, deviate from tiie straight line of God's law, and run themselves to misery and self-destruction, if no remedy were provided in God's law, as was then the case with Israt'l making and worshiping the golden calf. Therefore this revelation of God's attributes announces that Yhvh " pardons (or rather bears" with) in- iquity, transgression, and sin," as outlined already in his attribute of *' long siifiering," although " he makes no sinner guiltless; " the sinner himself must eradicate cause and effect of his sins, urged to this by punishment or by his own voluntary action. So God's love deals also with the nations. He bears or forbears their iniquities, transgressions, and sins, and cleanses none of his sins who does not cleanse himself How does God's love bear or forbear the sins of nations? In reply thereto this revelation announces a law of history, a law from the code of Providence, which affords an insight into the mystery of man's ex- istence and progress in this world, notwithstanding the numerous mis- takes, sins, and transgressions committed, and notwithstanding the holiness and justice of God. This law is: The Good and the True existing in man, or evolved by man iij the course of his history under the love of God, remains forever imperish- able, indestructible, and unforgotten, and increases in quantity and quality as the historical process goes on, as this revelation announces "He preserveth grace (the Good and the True) to the thousandth generation," i. e., forever. On the other hand, the opposite of the True and the Good — evil, wickedness, and all that is nugatory to mankind, produced by "the iniquity of the fathers" by deviation 24 THEOLOGY. from tlie straight line of God's law, with its evil effects upon human- ity — will perish and not reach beyond the third or fourth generation of those who hate God. He, by a peculiar arrangement of trans- piring facts, neutralizes the effects produced by the evil doers, so that they can not reach beyond the third or fourth generation. So God's love is manifested and actualized in the life of nations as well as in- dividuals. This involves the doctrine of man's perfectibility, and the visions of Israel's prophets who saw the golden age with all its glory in the distant future, when the True and the Good will have grown to be the sovereign power of humanity. The same law governs also the individual man. God's love neu- tralizes for the penitent sinner the effects of his sins and transgres- sions by a peculiar arrangement of transpiring facts, as Joseph verily said to his penitent brothers (Genesis 1, 19. 20). A very large num- ber of men inherit the iniquities of their fathers, their diseases of body and mind, their oppressive institutions and laws, their errors and ig- norance. Still all those evils remain unremedied with those only who hate God (Exodus xx, 5), who stubbornly refuse to see and embrace the True and the Good before them, and even then the evil effect reaches not beyond the fourth generation. This is the most intelligi- ble revelgttion of God as Supreme Goodness. This is Israel's God-cognitiou with its genesis in natural and tran- scendental revelation. It is the highest known to man, the utmost reason could comprehend. It is the immovable groundwork of all the- ology, hence also the Theology of Judaism. Whatever doctrine, pre- cept, dogma, or canon rises logically from this principle, is a legiti- mate part of the system. Again, whatever theory or practice is con- trary or contradictory to Israel's God-cognition can have no place in the Theology of Judaism. It comprises necessarily : 1. The doctrine concerning Providence, its relations to the indi- vidual, the nation, and mankind. This includes the doctrine of cove- nant between God and man, God and the fathers of the nation, God and the people of Israel, or the election of Israel. 2. The doctrine concerning Atonement. Are sins expiated, for- given, or pardoned, and which are the conditions or means for such expiation of sins ? 3. This leads us to the doctrine of Divine Worship generally, its obligatory nature, its proper means and forms, its subjective or objec- tive import, which includes also the precepts concerning holy seasons, holy places, holy convocations, and consecrated or specially appointed persons to conduct such divine worship, and the standard to distin- THK THEOLOGY OF JUDAISM. 25 guish conscientiously in the Tliorah the laws, statutes, and ordinances ■which were originally intended to be always obligatory, from those which were originally intended for a certain tiine and place, and under special circumstances. 4. The doctrine concerning the Human Will ; is it free, condi- tioned or controlled by reason, faith, or any other agency? This in- cludes the postulate of ethics. 5. The Duty and Accountability of Man in all his relations to God, man, and himself, to his nation aud its government, and to the whole of the human family. This includes the duty we owe to the past, to that which the process of history developed and established. 6. This leads to the doctrine concerning the future of Mankind, the ultimate of the historical process, to culminate in a higher or lower status of humanity. This includes the question of perfectibility of human nature and the possibilities it contains, which establishes a standard of duty we owe to the future. 7. The doctrine concerning personal immortality, future reward and punishment, the means by which such immortality is attained, the condition on which it depends, what insures reward or punish- ment. The Theology of Judaism as a systematic structure must solve these problems on the basis of Israel's God-cognition. This being the highest in man's cognition, the solution of all problems upon this basis, ecclesiastical, ethical, or eschatological, must be final in theology, pro- vided the judgment which leads to this solution is not erroneous. An erroneous judgment from true antecedents is possible. In such cases the first safeguard is an appeal to reason, and the second, though not secondary, is an appeal to Holy Writ and its best commentaries. Wherever these two authorities, reason and Holy Writ, agree, that the solution of any problem on the basis of Israel's God-cognition is cor- rect, certitude is established, the ultimate solution is found. This is the structure of a systematic theology. Israel's God- cognition is the substratum, the substance ; Holy Writ aud the stand- ard of reason are the desiderata, and the faculty of reason is the ap- paratus to solve the problems which in their unity are the Theology of Judaism, higher than which none can be. 26 THEOLOGY. SYLLABUS OF A TREATISE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS IN JUDAISM SINCE MOSES MEN- DELSOHN. By G. GOTTHEIL, D.D. A development of the ideas of Judaism took place, and could take place only, where the principle of reform was recognized. Else- where stability reigns. True men's views do change in course of time malgre eux, and by degrees imperceptible to themselves; just as their daily habits and modes of life change without their being aware of it. Notably in a century like ours, that witnessed so many and so wide departures from received ideas, it is not within nature that men's minds should remain unaffected. Freedom of thought and of speech, now conceded by all civilized governments, engenders a critical spirit. Old beliefs and institutions are challenged as to their light of continu- ance ; their defense compels investigations by persons who, but for this exigency, would never have thought of them ; and researches of that kind rarely leave men exactly where they found them. Even that bulwark of stability, the Roman Church, now recognizes the spirit of the time, and her present ruler earns general praise for the skill with which he steers his ship before the winds, and makes them swell his sails and bear him forward. In tlieory, the orthodox Jew, or, at least, his spokesman, repudi- ates all ideas of change ; but in reality, he is no more in all things like his forefather of a century ago than Maimonides was like Hillel, or, for the matter of that, as Mendelsohn was like that great light of the twelfth century. Still, these moldings by the silent but potent hand of time can not be called developments. Theylead to no conceptions recognized as new, result m no fresh statements of old truths, and are allowed no practical influence on the religions life of the community. There is no definite goal before the mind's eye toward which its energies are bent; on the contrary, all desire to change is stoutly denied, whilst in the case of a development the alteration is the very thing aimed at. -The old, admitted as no longer adequate to the needs of the present, shall make room for the new. No breach with the past is intended ; only an adjustment of both doctrine and life to the undeniable and DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS IN JUDAISM. 27 not unwelcome facts before us, lest these facts ride over us and crush us out of existence. Reformed Judaism originated in Germany, and is still found in those countries only to which German Israelites have Carried it. Practically, all Western Jews are alike in regard to the observance of the rituals, but by none except Germans has the attempt been made to legalize their derelictions. The reform of Synagogue-worship in England has been feeble from the start, and has gained no strength during the fifty years that have elapsed since. In other countries, not even these weak beginnings were made. Ill saying Germans, we disregard political limits and include in their number Germans living in Austria, Hungary, and other countries. But it was not given to the Germans in Europe to carry to their full fruition the principles they bad formulated, and to gather the prizes of their hard-won victories. A political reaction set in, too well known for needing description, that chilled their ardor — nay, made all further progress impossible. Governments frowned upon all things liberal, reformed congregations had to use the greatest circum- spection to save their synagogues from being closed by the police ; anti- Semitism began to rage and to re-enact scenes of ages commonly called dark. Fanatics in our own orthodox ranks cried: "Behold now the fruit of your vaunted progress, the idol to whom you sacri- ficed our laws and time-honored usages! You might indeed liberalize your faith and your services, but you can not liberalize the people around you, nor prevent statecraft on the one hand and demagogism on the other from using you for their own political ends, by making once more your name a hissing and a by-word." No wonder the Ger- man Reformer lost heart ; no wonder liis heart sank. The disenchant- ment was all too cruel. Amidst the general discouragement, all they could do was to try and save what had so far been gained for better days to come. Ideas need for their development free air, a buoyant, hopeful spirit, and a sense of security. These elements America oifered, and hither came men that stood high in the counsels of the German Reform- ers, men, moreover, whose learning and fervent spirit fitted them well for the pioneer's peculiar task. Most of their number have now gone to their reward ; but their work lives after them. It has prospered and spread to almost every state of the Union, and is steadily putting forth new strength. It shall not be denied that a good pruning of some -wild shoots is necessary. The zeal of the younger generation of lead- 28 THEOLOGY. ers is not always according to knowledge ; it is apt to run to extremes and to do things which will have to be undone again. But, taking all in all, the Eeform Congregations of the United States may claim to have continued the work begun some seventy years ago in Germany, but interrupted by adverse circumstances, and to have carried that work forward to permanent results. In the designation Post-Mendelsohuian, "post'' means also "propter." It was that gentle yet forceful spirit that sent the first rays of light into the darkness which had settled, for centuries past, over the Jews and their religion. He knocked at the door of the Jewish mind, barred and bolted against all intrusion, and, although his rap was of the gentlest, it could not be overheard, nor be left without some response. Here and there a sleeper awoke and (to use Graetz's graphic phrase) rubbed his eyes, and, looking about, asked himself : " Where am I ? " " What am I ? " "' Why am I in this slough of ignorance and social abasement ? " Mendelsohn was, as it were, the living, the visible proof that a strict. observer of the Law, a "Talmudjude," may be a modern man in thought, in literature, in so- cial intercourse, may eveu take rank amongst the recognized leaders in philosophy and literature. Like Maimouides, he appeared at the threshold of a new era, fettered in his religious practice, but liberated in his philosophical thought. Yet, although he, in his wjnning per- sonality, could unite and harmonize the two, the conflict, as far as the people at large were concerned, was inevitable. Mendelsohn pleading for the civil emancipation of the Jews had to urge the Jews themselves to acquire the speech, the manners, the culture of their surroundings. Was it possible for his people to listen to him, and yet carry the whole weight of the rabbinical Law with them ? It was not long before that question came to the front, and was openly answered in the negative. This explains the nature of the German Reform movement. It did not begin as a revolt from ecclesiastical oppression ; it was not a deflection from the faith on which the synagogue is built ; it was life itself that deraandsd relief. Problems more vital far and deeper soon came to the surface. The Israelite should not be placed in the dilemma of either foregoing the full enjoyment of his civil rights or forswearing his religion, but just as little should he profess doctrines or practice rites which he had ceased to believe in, or which conflicted with his own widened sentiments. The following was the form in which the last aim of the movement was mostly expressed : "Den innern Glauben mit dem aussern Bekenntniss und der DEVELOPMENT OF EEDIGIOUS IDEAS IN JUDAISM. 29 religiosen Uebung in Einklang zu bringen und das Leben mit der Religion zu versohnen." A great undertaking, truly, especially when dealing witb a faith as old, as complex, as dearly bought, and as completely identified with the whole life of its professors, as Judaism. But the brave re- formers did not shrink from it. With a heroic faith in the vitality of their religion, they addressed themselves to their task and faced the storm which their declaration provoked from the defenders of the es- tablished church. The beginning was made, as was natural, with the question of authority in Judaism. Bible and Talmud, or rather the codes into which the multitudinous laws deduced from them had been petrified, held undisputed sway. The Reformers did not deny it. Their first propo- sitions were still discussed on that ; the written and the oral Law were invoked by both, advocates of reform and opponents. The abrogation of a ritual, the change of a prayer, the use of the vernacular in wor- ship, the introduction of the organ into the synagogue, and similar in- novations, were debated, not on their own merits, but on the grounds of existing legislation. As a matter of course the advantage was with the orthodox. So, by-and-by, the right of the Talmud or oral traditions to dominate all succeeding generations was challenged, and then denied. One of the strongest arguments for this dethronement was the charge, not a new one, that the oral Law obscured the light of the revealed Law, nay, is often found to contradict the clearest teachings of the latter. For the sake of restoring the Torali to its legitimate right as the only true word of God, tlie Talmud had to recede. But this restitution did not last long ; for it was soon observed, as people began to codify the Mosaic Laws, that many of them were just as inapplicable to our time and condition and often as contrary to our present ideas as most of the rabbinical enactments; and, fur- tliermore, that those usages that might still be observed, needed tra- dition for their interpretation and application. At that stage Spinoza's distinction between the political and moral parts of the Law was recalled and insisted upon. The former by their very nature must be subject to changes, and could, therefore, never have been intended by their author as binding for all times; the latter only might be so considered and accepted as the abiding doctrine of Judaism and the groundwork of its theology. In the meanwhile, however, the critical or historical school of Bible students had arisen, with its theory of a gradual evo- lution of the Hebrew literature. Shunned and even ridiculed at first, that view gradually gained the scholar's ear, and many of the Jewish 30 THEOLOGY. reformers openly avowed their acceptance of the new method of " Torahstudium." The Scriptures themselves, then, became part of Jewisii tradition; in point of time, the oral record preceded the writ- ten even from the beginning; all Judaism, from first to last, is the product of the Jewish raiiid, or, to use the phrase now in vogue — of the peculiar genius of the Jews for the religious life. The adoption of that view was and is of the utmost moment to the Reformer ; for it puts an end to all discussions as to his right of changing the trans- mitted forms of worship or stating anew the ancient principles of ftiith. If all came from the people, to the people belongs the rule over it, if the experiences, the trials, the triumphs, and defeats of the na- tion furnished the training by which the native endowment of the Hebrew mind was educated for its peculiar mission to the world — that training has never ceased and should, therefore, produce new results. Verbal revelations were no longer received, prophets fell silent, when the days for that mode of teaching passed away; but neither revela- tion itself, nor prophesying itself, can have vanished from the Hebrew mind. What was true of the spirit once, is true of it always ; if men concede a Divine economy in the unique guidance of Israel, that economy must continue as long as that guidance preserves its char- acter. Hence, concludes the modern Reformer, the duty rests upon us to give our ear to wtiat God is still revealing to us, to try to un- derstand it, and lay it to heart, and to withhold it from ito one tliat would listen to us. This principle adopted, we are no longer answer- able because we still hold to the Old Testament, for every thing the book contains concerning the nature of God, or His providence, or His justice, or in regard to the soul, or our duties to men, or the rights of the Gentiles, and so forth ; we place these things at their historical value. Neither can they hinder us from receiving light and inspiration from other sources. All our literature is for guidance, not for dominion over the spirit. The following are the most essential changes in the tenets of Judaism that have come to pass under the in- fluence of Reform principles. 1. The Unity of God, that chief corner-stone of Judaism, is con- ceived of more in its inclusive than exclusive bearing; it is no lonirer, as it has been, a cause of separation and estrangement from people of other faiths, but the opposite, a stimulus for seeking their fellowship and co-operation in all things good, true, and right. Faith in the One Father in Heaven imposes upon us the obligation to bring all his hu- man children into the bond of one common brotherhood. Rituals in- tended exclusively to keep the Jew apart from his environments we abandon for that very reason ; all traces of hostility to any one section DEVELOPMENT OP RELIGIOUS IDEAS IN JUDAISM. 31 of mankind, no matter what tlieir religion, no matter what justifica- tion the compilers of our liturgies had when they called for vengeance on their persecutors, are expunged from our prayers and hymns. 2. The idea of a "chosen people" has for us no other meaning than that of a people commissioned to do a certain work amongst men ; it implies, in our sense, no inherent superiority of race or de- scent, least of all preference and favoritism iu heaven. The word that came from the Jewish mind thousands of years ago, " God is no re- specter of persons," is not contravened by us either in our belief or in our prayers, or in our feelings toward non-Jews ; and that other word from the same source, " Love thy neighbor as thyself," forbids us to countenance the least restriction of right or of duty based on a differ- ence of race, station, culture, or religion. Whatever there is yet in our liturgies or in our ceremonials, even if it; only seems to conflict with that great truth, will disappear when the new Order of Service, now iu preparation, shall become the accepted ritual expression of the Reformed Judaism in America. 3. Palestine is venei-able to us as the ancient home of our race, the birthplace of our faith, the land where our seers saw visions and our "bards sang their holy hymns ; but it is no longer our country in the sense of ownership, ancient or prospective ; that title appertains to the land of our birtii or adoption ; and " our nation" is that nation of which we form a part, and with the destinies of which we are identi- fied, to the exclusion of all others. Israel is a religious commuuity only; even the feeling of identity of race is weakening. Restoration to Palestine forms no part of our prayers; neither does the lost sacri- ficial service, connected with that hope, because : 4. The substitute, the worship of prayer and praise and of the devout reading of the Scriptures, had already won the affections of the Jewish people a century and more before the Christian era; in the regions of the diaspora, long before that time. The people's meeting- house or synagogue, that glorious creation of the Rabbis, as Claude Montefiore calls it, the venerable mother of every ciiureh or mosque on earth, of St. Peter in Rome, St. Paul in London, and the Tadsh in India, became the People's Temple, and the pious and informed leader in devotion became the priest of the future. Only because it was violently wrenched from the nation and by the same stroke that ended its life, the loss of the sacrificial Ritual continued to be bewailed and its restitution prayed for so long and so fervently. The sorrows of the exile hid from the Jewish mind the true significance of the in- terdict of sacrifices by the inexorable edict of fate. But light came ■with the new day of liberty; Israel "fell, we say, but fell upward;" 32 THEOLOGY. and we have no desire to seek our way downward again. The adop- tion of the word "Temple" for our modern houses of prayer, in preference of " Synagogue," is one of the landmarks of the new era. It is a public avowal, and, as it were, official declaration, that our final separation from Palestine and Jerusalem has deprived us of nothing we can not have wherever we gather together for the worship of the One and only true God and the study of His will. 5. The tragic question of the Messiah has ceased to be a question for us ; it has been answered once for all, and in such wise that we have uo controversy on that point with any creed or church. Has come, is come, or to come agaiu, all diflference in time, is meaningless to us by the adoption of the present tense: Messiah is coming now, as he has been coming in all past ages ; as one of the Talmudists dis- tinctly taught: nni^,i:ir pSJ^J-fin DINO n'tl'On mo* "Mes- siah's days are from Adam until now." That form of the idea about which the dispute has hitherto been waged between synagogue and church is clearly a creation of the needs of a certain period of Jewish history fashioned in the likeness of the minds that testified of it; that we leave to history what was temporal in the conception ; and keep only that which is spiritual, and, therefore, above time. That part consists in the belief that mankind will outgrow and overcome all causes of evil in its midst ; that peace and not war, love and not hatred, freedom and not bondage, joy and not pain, knowledge and not ignorance, trust and not fear, hope and not despair, are the ends toward which the Euler of the world is guiding mankind ; and that Israel was chosen to make this proclamation to the world, and to labor and to suffer in the fulfillment of that mission. About things of the past, we dispute not, believing with Goethe that Alles Geschehende 1st nur ein Gleichniss, let every one construe these events or what goes for such as he sees fit. What alone and always concerns us is its influence upon the present. And when the Eeforraed Jew says : Messiah means progress, means betterment all around, means peace, means redeeming of the fallen, means equality of rights and good will toward all men, means, in short, the best which the best minds could ever think of as not too good for the humblest brother or sister — how far is he in this hope and faith from the hope and faith of the best Christian ? What mat- ters it how the movement began or who began it — so we only agree that we must move on and upward in the same direction. Has it not been DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS IN JUDAISM. 33 said ill both Testaments that in the end God shall be all in all ? Then shall the death of creeds be swallowed up in the victory of God's own eternal life. 6. With the development of the Messianic idea came the change in the conception of Israel's dispersion. As in all calamities, so in the final catastrophe that ended his national life, there was punishment for sins ; but it was not that alone, nor chiefly so ; how else can we account for the heroism displayed by the people and the magnificence of Judea's death scenes? The flames that consumed Jerusalem's splendor and the temple's treasures were his magnificent funeral pile. Can sin, can crime be so glorified? And has he not received a thou- sandfold for all his sins? I say: this is the mercy of God that His punishments are meant for good and not for evil, for blessing and not for curse ; and he that curses the sinner curses God, as he that mock- eth the poor, mocketh his maker. We deplore no more our dispersion, wish for no ingathering. Where God has scattered us, there also is His vineyard into which we are called as laborers ; and well will it be with us if we are numbered amongst those that were found faithful unto the Common Master. These, in brief and general outline, are the changes of ideas that have come to pass since Mendelsohn. Within this framework others of less vital importance, though not less notable, occurred, which, however, it is impossible to mention without trespassing the limits of time allowed ; as the Sabbath and the Sunday services, the position of woman, and others. They will, however, appear ,in the complete treatise. If it be said : " But yours is no longer the Judaism history knows ; it is virtually a new Judaism," we answer : " Be it so, as long as it is Judaism ; aud where is the man or body of men that have the right to say it is not?" We stand for the sacred privilege of every man to name his religion as he chooses, and to affiliate himself to any creed or church with which he feels himself in sympathy. Will any one dare to question the fidelity of the modern Jew to his brethren, or his independence in avowing his religion and race ? A new Judaism. This is precisely what the movement aims at. It does not wince before the accusation. It is not the first time that Judaism is taking on a new form of expres- sion and rises to a wider reach of conceptions. It has passed through several crises and come forth in better health and with a stronger con- stitution. Our inspiring thought is, that this wonderful faith, withal so simple, so free from mysticism — this faith, with obedience to God's law as its main artery, and righteousness for its soul — should have passed through its evolutions without losing its identity ; that it did 34 THEOLOGY. not perish under the ceaseless strokes of a world that has emptied all the vials of its wrath upon it. Think of it, what it means. A relig- ion of that hoary age and that long and varied experience, so soon as it feels the breath of the new day, bestirs itself, girds up its loins, and begins the work of fitting and adjusting itself to the needs and require- ments of the present time. Why, the niere will and purpose and dar- ing, even if nothing came of it, prove that it can not be a dead or dying faith. But look about you, and see the fruits of the departure on every side. Here we are, in these great and holy days, amongst you, brethren of all the earth, followers of many prophets, disciples of many masters, children of many churches, gathered together from the East and from the West, from the North and from, the South. Here we are, a community, oldest iu time, but smallest in tale, with a record of trials that must touch every feeling heart. Here we are, with our old message still on our lips, seeking your fellowship, pledging our good faith to the best things you stand for, asking nothing but what you yourselves declare to be due to every child of God. Will you reject our hand, or, accepting, help us to make God's covenant with his ancient people a covenant of peace between all peoples and the everlasting Father in heaven ? THE SABBATH IN JUDAISM. 35 THE SABBATH IN JUDAISM. By dr. B. FELSENTHAL. The desire has been expressed that some one belonging to the Jewish community and confessing tlie Jewish religion should come for- ward on this platform and speak on the Sabbath-question from Jiis Jewish standpoint. In compliance with the kind request that I should do so, I appear before you and offer you a few thoughts on this highly interesting topic. The Sabbath, conceived as a day of rest and of sanctification, is undoubtedly of a Jewish origin, and to the Jews the Ciiristian world is indebted for this grand institution. It is true enough — and we admit it without hesitation — that the Semitic nations, an)ong them the As- syrians especially, celebrated in their own way and manner one day in each week, long before the Israelites did so. But with them the day was not a day of rest, giving recreation to the body ; not a day of pure and innocent joy, refreshing to the soul ; not a day of thought- ful meditation, enlarging the mind. It was with them either a day of fasting, of wailing and lamentation, or a day given up to sensual excesses and to low and degrading revelry. And, furthermore, it was dedicated to the god Saturn, a god whom the prophet Amos mentions under the name of Kiyyun, or to some other of the gods worshiped by these heathenish nations. From Western Asia the belief in the seven planetary deities, ruling the seven days of the week, came to Egypt, from Egypt to Rome, from Rome to Gallia, Germania, the British Islands, and other European countries, and in the English lan- guage the name of the seventh day of the week, viz., the name Saturday, is still bearing witness to the fact that the seventh day iu the week was dedicated in ancient times to the god Saturn. While among the Assyrians and a few kindred nations the day celebrated in each week was devoted either to fasting and mourning or to sensual and dissolute pleasures, the celebration of the Sabbath among the Israelites was decidedly and essentially of quite a different nature. With them it was, or at least it became in the course of a few centuries, a day of joyful rest from wearisome labor, a day of ho- liness, of elevating the mind, of cleansing the heart, of purifying the 36 THEOLOGY. will. It became a means for lifting up the Israelite religiously and morally, and for placing him, religiously and morally, ou a higher plane. In this connection it deserves especially to be noted that by the Sabbath the Israelite was lead to a humane treatment of all his fellow-beings — of all his fellow-beings, including the sorrow-laden stranger and the afflicted slave, including even the toiling and other- wise helpless cattle. For thus it is repeatedly said in the Law, "Thy man-servant and thy maid-servant shall rest on the Sabbath-day as well as thyself, and the stranger within thy gates also, and thy ox and thy ass likewise.'' And this day was not devoted to Saturn or to some other pagan deity, but it was Shabbath la-Jehovah SloJiekha, a Sabbath devoted' " to the Lord thy God;" it was Kodesh, sanctified, or set apart, to the service of the Lord, to the One-God of Israel and of all the world, to the Ruler of the nations, the Father of mankind. In the first centuries, following the times of Moses, the masses of the people had not risen to the heights of the pure and lofty con- ception of the Sahbath-idea as it was taught by the divinely inspired prophets. From the words of warning and admonition and exhorta- tion falling from the lips of several of these prophets, we must con- clude that there were large numbers of people who disregarded or pro- faned the Sabbath, and who did not keep it in the sense desired by these prophets and incomparable teachers ; by these teachers who were teachers not only for their contemporaries, but for all subsequent generations, and not only for Israel, but for all the world. Still, nearly a hundred years after the return from the Balylonian captivity, Neliemiah bitterly complained about the profanation of the Sabbath, and from the Biblical book bearing his name, we learn how he in- sisted upon certain measures in order to bring about a better observance of the day. But in post-Nehemian times, a stricter observance of the Sabbath became general, and since the fifth century B. 0. until the middle of the present century, the Jews, as a community, rarely, if ever, desecrated the Sabbath by physical labor or otherwise. On the coutrary, a spirit of extreme rigor in the manner of keeping the Sab- bath grew up rapidly, and a tendency prevailed to extend to the utmost limits the practice of abstaining from labor, and to follow the deductions from this law and the ramifications of the same in all pos- sible directions. But there was a danger lurking in this tendency, the danger that thereby the higher character of the Sabbath and its power for sanctifying the soul-life of the observant Jew might be for- gotten, or might at least be pushed into the background. Happily — thus impartial History teaches us — these apprehensions proved to be groundless. The Sabbath retained its sanctifying power and influ- THE SABBATH IN JUDAISM. 37 ence even among the extremest of the strictly law-abiding Jews, with whom each of the numerous precepts of the so-called Oral Law or Traditional Law was a noli me iangere. With a majority of the peo- ple at least, the essence of the Sabbath was not considered to exist in the observance of the innumerable negative, talmudical, and rab- binical precepts, telling us what a Jew must not do on the Sabbath, and the higher character of the Sabbath did not disappear and did not become lost among the Jews. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the great teacher of Nazareth was perfectly correct when he upbraided a certain class of his Jewish contemporaries for their laying the main stress and accent upon the negative side of keeping the Sabbath. His words regarding the Sabbath were golden words. And he was in full harmony and accord with other Jewish teachers living in his time or soon after him, when he maintained that not in the Sabbath ceremonials and not in the scrupulous abstaining from physical labor consists the holiness of the Sabbath; and when he said that, "the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath." Rab- binical sayings which have come down to us from the Apostolic age and which are clothed almost in the very words in which the cor- responding New Testament sentences are expressed, we meet fre- quently in the various parts of the Talmudical literature. Ha-Shab- bath mesurah lakhem velo attem mesurim la-Shabbath ; "the Sabbath is handed over to you, but you are not liauded over to the Sabbath." ICol saphek nephasJioth do'he eih lia-Shabbath ; "if the remotest danger to health or life is to be apprehended, the Sabbath must be disre- garded and the Sabbath laws must be deviated from," Such and similar sentences could be quoted from the Jewish literature of yonder times in considerable number. The regulations of the Pharisees in the times of Jesus, the laws laid down by the dialecticians of the Tal- mud and their followers in later centuries, by the casuists of the post- talmudical period, they could not and did not deprive the Jewish Sab- bath of its higher and holier character. They contributed rather to a certain degree to enhance the holiness of the Sabbath, and to give to the day a still greater power for sanctifying the inner and the outer life of the confessor of Judaism. But, iu briefly outlining the history of the Sabbath institution among Jews, should we restrict ourselves to merely looking up the old Jewish law-books? No live institution can be fully understood if we study merely the written laws and ordinances concerning the same. The life of any great institution and its real character manifests itself independently of the words of books, of the letters of laws, of the say- ings of old authorities. And if we now ask history, we shall soon o» THEOLOGY. learn that the Sabbath proved to be au institution of the greatest blessing for the Jews. It was for them, in the first place, one of the means, and a very powerful one, bj' which the preservation of the Jews as a separate religious community was secured. The Sabbath endowed them with an unshakable confidence in a Divine Providence, and gave them every week new strength to withstand the almost unceasing cruel and pitiless attempts to exterminate the Jewish people and to extinguish the Jewish religion ; and it kept them united as one religious denomination despite of their having been dispersed over so many parts of the world and despite of their having no ruling hie- rarcliy and no other centralizing authorities. The Sabbath, together with a few other strong bonds, effected this almost miraculous per- petuation of Israel's existence. And what a great bliss and happiness did the Sabbath bring to the family-life! The more the storms raged outside, the closer and firmer became the mutual attachment of the members of the families to each other and of the families among themselves. And while the Jews during the week days had to go out into the world and to see where they could find the scanty bread for themselves and their families, and while in doing so they had to experience so much Jiuniiliatiou, so much malice, so much hatred — when the Friday evening came and they were again within the circles of their families, they were joyful, they lighted the Sabbath lamps, they sang their Sabbath hymns, they chanted their Psalms, and they forgot, once iu each week, all the sor- rows and cares of every-day-life, and all the affronts and insults which, without pity and without mercy, were heaped upon them, and at least on the Sabbath they felt released in body and soul from troubles and burdens. The Sabbath proved also a great blessing to the Jews in another regard. To the observance of this day the Jews owe the conspicuous fact that ignorance never spread among them as far as among many other nations and sects. With the Jews education and learning were at all times kept in high esteem. To this came now the deep-rooted usage that in each city and town where Jews were livino-, discourses were delivered and learned debates were held on the Sabbath days in schools, in the synagogues, in the meeting rooms of societies of various kinds, and in consequence of the instruction received by these dis- courses and debates the audiences were more or less enlightened in the principles of their faith and in the doctrines and precepts of their re- ligion. And thus to the Sabbath, too, we can partly ascribe the fact that, in that period of history called "the Middle Ages," a period which was characterized by the deep darkness of ignorance and super- THE SABBATH IN JUDAISM. 39 stition prevailing almost every-where among the Christian nations in those times, numerous poets and philosophers and scholars arose and flourished among the Jews. We must, before we close, not forget to remark that the Jewish Sabbath had at all times the character of cheerfulness and delighr. In the Old Testament already we read the words of the prophet by which he reminded the people to " call the Sabbath a delight." And in the post-biblical literature of the Jews we find evidence that for the Jews the Sabbath was a day of cheerfulness and of bright sunshine, a iundredfold and a thousaudfold. Other sources of Jewish history corroborate more than fully the fact that the Sabbath among the Jews had such a serene and cheering character. On each Friday afternoon, "when the Sabbath was approaching — so we read in the Talmud — Rabbi ^Hanina clothed himself in his iestive attire and went into the fields with his disciples and friends, saying to them: "Come, let us go to meet becomingly and in a festive mode the queen Sabbath." Rabbi Jannai acted likewise, and he was accustomed to receive the Sabbath joyfully by saying: " Be welcome, O bride! Be welcome, O bride!" Habbi Josua, another great authority of the Talmud, said: "Let the celebration of the Sabbath be divided into two parts ; one half to be devoted to God, the other half to your own enjoyment." Rabbi Jose said: "Whosoever keeps the Sabbath in a joyous manner, will be richly rewarded." Rabbi Jehudah added: "Whosoever keeps the Sabbath in a joyous manner, will have all the desires of his heart ful- filled." And how — thus the Talmud continues to ask — -is the Sabbath to be kept in a joyous manner? To which question one of the rabbis answers: "By having better meals than usually and the like." Let it also be added here, that it was a law antedating the rise of Christianity to open the festive celebration of the Sabbath on Friday evenings by Kiddush, that is, by praising God, the giver of all good things, over a cup of wine, and by the drinking of wine during the Sabbath meals, and every one of the family partook in this wine drinking. Without doubt, this law concerning Kiddush was piously observed by Jesus and his friends, as he, whom millions of our Christian brethren adore as their "Master" and as the divine founder of their religion, himself has declared that he had not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it. Tlii.s law just mentioned is still strictly observed among so-called or- thodox Jews, by those who have the means to do so. Sad and serious contemplations were not permitted on Sabbath, nor were fasting, or mourning, or supplications in behalf of sufferers. While the reading and study of Sacred Scriptures and of other good books was certainly highly recommended, it was prohibited to read on 40 THEOLOGY. Sabbath certain parts of them, as e. g. the Lamentations of Jeremiah and other portions of a similar sad character. For no gloom should fill the heart of the Jew on the Sabbath, and no other sentiment should dwell therein than of pure joy. It is well known that the pre- cepts of Judaism laid great stress upon the sacred duty of visiting the sick and of consoling the mourner. While such acts of kindness, of sympathy and mercy were not to be neglected on the Sabbath day on account of the Sabbath, yet the Sabbath joy should be disturbed thereby as little as possible. Thus, when one visited on a Sabbath a sick person, he had to refrain from the common methods of consola- tion, and he had to say to the sick and his friends : " It is Sab- bath to-day, and it is not right that on this day we should send up to God our supplications to restore the suffering brother ; but health and strength, let us hope, will speedily come, and you, you keep your Sabbath in peace." Similar words were spoke on Sabbath to those who were in mourning for a dear departed one. Much more could be said on this subject. Hours could be filled without exhausting it. Yet I feel that this is not the place nor the time for doing so. One thought, however, I can not refrain from ex- pfessing before I close. We live, God be praised, in the freest laud of the world, in the United States of America, in a land where Church and State are entirely separated, and where every one can follow the dictates of his own conscience and the precepts of his own religion, as long as he does not thereby infringe upon the rights and privileges of his neighbor. Let now the Jew, who desires to keep his Sabbath in his own way, have the undisturbed i-ight to keep it when and how he wishes. And let no unholy and sacrilegious hands attempt to attack the sanctuary of American freedom. May the dark day never come on which it shall be decreed by any legislative or execu-. tive power in America that one certain day for keeping the Sabbath and one certain manner of keeping it be forced upon unwilling mi- norities. The Sabbath is a grand and sacred institution — we all agree in that. But its celebration must be left to the individual ; it belongs to the category of his eternal and inalienable rights. American liberty, I venture to say, is a still grander and a still holier institution, and the maintenance of it is intrusted to each and every American citizen. Wo praise the weekly Sabbath, we are sure that from it immense blessino-s will spring forth — blessings for the mental and for the moral life of individuals, of families, and of society at large. But what the laws and statutes, enacted or to be enacted by the legislative authorities of our American States, can do for the Sabbath, is this, and only this: They can protect and ought to protect every congregation assembled THE SABBATH IN JUDAISM. 41 on their Sabbath for divine worship in a church, or a cliapel, or a synagogue, or a mosque, or any other place, against being disturbed in their worship; and they can guarantee and ought to guarantee to eacli person in our laud, and be he the poorest laborer, one day of perfect rest in each week of seven consecutive days. All further Sabbath legislation by the State powers is unnecessary and would be un- American. But let us, let all the frieuds of the great and sacred Sabbath-institution trust in the power of public opinion. Relying upon this great power and upon the divine blessings of our Heavenly Father, we, all of us and all the friends of the holy Sabbath-institution, can look hopefully toward the future and can rest assured that the land in all times to come will have a Sabbath, a real, genuine Sabbath. 42 THEOLOGY. WHAT THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES HAVE WROUGHT FOR MANKIND. By dr. ALEXANDER KOHUT, NEW YORK. To them who cradled in the infancy of faith, rocked by violent tempests of adversity, and tried by passiou-waves of lurking tempta- tion; who seeking virtues, find but vice ; who striving for the ideal, gain but the bleakest summit of realism ; who sorely pressed by rude time and ruder destiny, encounter but shipwrecks upon shipwrecks in the turbulent oceans of existence: God is the anchor of a newborn hope, the electric quickener of life's uneven current, drifting into His harbor of safest refuge from the hurricanes of outward seas, wherein no ship, no craft ever founders, drifting into the tranquil Bible streams. Faith is a spark of God's own flame, and nowhere did it burn •with more persistence than in the ample folds of Israel's devotion. There worship and sacerdotal lights of virtue glowed with mellow un- pretentious ambition, fanned by prophetic admonition and timely ad- vices. No exterior luster of transient hue could effectually diminish the chaste, unrivaled radiance of Israel's ever luminous belief in Him and His all-guiding providence. With faith as the corner-stone of the future, the glorious past of the Jew, suffused with the warmest sun- shine of divine effulgence and human trust, reflects the most perfect image of individual and national existence. Faith — the Bible creed of Israel — was the first and most vital principle of universal ethics, and it was the Jew, now the Pariah pilgrim of ungrateful humanity, who bequeathed this precious legacy to Semitic and Aryan nations, who sowed the healthy seeds of irradicable belief in often unfertile ground, but with patient, inexhaustible vigor infused that inherent vitality of propagation and endurance, which forever marks the progress and tri- umph of God's chosen, though unaccepted people. This then, to begin with, is Judea's first and dearest donation to mankind's treasury of good ! Israel also gave the world a pure religion, a creed undomiuated by cumbrous tyranny, unembarrassed by dogmatic technicalities, unsus- tained by heavy self-sacrifice and over-extravagant ceremonialism — a religion sublime and unique in history, free from gaping superstitions. WHAT THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES HAVE WROUGFiT, ETC. 43 appalling idolatries aud vicious immoralities; a pure, taintless, lofty, elevating, inspiring and love-permeating faith, originating in a mono- theistic conception, aud culminating in that indestructible edifice, which no waterfall of time, no Stratagem of destiny, no shrewd device of man, no whim of circumstance, no hatred, no bigotry, and no harsh excommunication from civilization, could ever degrade into intellectual slavery, beguile into infidelity, or corrupt into treachery. A relig- ion at whose sparkling fountain wells of ethical and cultural truths the world's famed pioneers in art, science, literature, politics; philoso- phy, architecture and kindred attainments of learning, so eminently wielded by classic Greece and boastful Rome, slaked their thirst. In religion, Hebrew genius was supreme. It is no rhetorical ex- travagance of sentiment, nor misplaced eulogy, to assert, that " in the ancient world Israel attained an eminence as much above all other peoples of the circum-Mediterranean world in religion as did Greece in art, philosophy and science, or Rome in war aud government." In fact, the Hebrews drank of the fountain, the Greeks from the stream, and the Romans from the -pool. Those majestic Hebrew seers are reproduced in worthy prototypes in modern Judea to-day, only in them the national force was strongly impelled upward. " They grasped heavenly things so vividly, that even their bodily senses seemed to lay hold of God and afigels. Spiritual presences faced the bodily sight in wilderness, or burning bush, or above the ark of the covenant. The earthly ear caught tones from the other world in some still, sinall voice, or pealing from a bare mountain peak. And here it is that the Jew has accomplished his most extraordinary achievement. His faith furnished the stock upon which two other religions have grafted their creeds. And all this national magnificence, religious superiority and un- paralleled historic grandeur is recorded in the Sacred Annals — that unsurpassed standard for man's moral and mental government — the Sooh. Every unprejudiced mind gladly acknowledges now that the Jiible, the divine Encyclopedia of unalienable truths aud morals, be- longs to the world, like the sun, the air, the ocean, the rivers, the fountains — the common heirloom of humanity. No need to ask who first bequeathed its treasures of law, religion, truth, morality, righteousness, equity, brotherly love, not to speak of its literary and scientific merits; who first diffused its luster, dissemi- nated its doctrines ; who first planted so extensively and cultivated so highly this flower-garden with its diverse variety of luscious fruits and blooming lands ? Was it not Moses charged by the Lord : " Gather the people together, and I will give theni water!" and was it not Israel that sang this song : 44 THEOLOGY. " Spring up, O well, sing ye (nations) unto it, The well which the nobler of the people delved With the scepter and with their staves." Clialdea wrought magic; Babylouia, myth; Greece, art; Rome, war and chivalry; — of Judea, let it be said, that she founded a hal- lowed faith, spread a pure religion, and propagated the paternal love of an all-father. His omnipresence feeds the lamp of the universe, speaking in all its voices, listening in all its silence, storming in its rage, reposing in its calm ; its light the shadow of His greatness, its gloom the hiding-place of His power, its verdure the trace of His steps, its fire the breath of His nostrils, its motion the circulation of His un- tiring energies, its warmth the effluence of His love, its mountains the altars of His worship and its oceans the mirrors where He beholds His form "glassed in tempest." Compared to those conceptions, how does the fine dream of the pagan myths melt away — Olympus with its multitude of stately, celestial natures, dwindles before the solitary, im- mutable throne of Adonai. What is all the poetry and philosophy of Greece, all the wisdom of the entire heathenish world, compared with the one sentence : " Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one," or held before any of those ten majestic commands hurled down amid lurid blaze from above, in a halo of divine revelation ! The revealed Mosaic Law, with its unequaled mastery of detail, its comprehensiveness of character, its universality of human right and rigid suppression of wrong, its enthusiastic championship of truth, justice, morality, and above all righteousness, is the most unique marvel of lofty wisdom and divine forethought ever penned into the inspired records of authentic history. Righteousness, from its patriarchal primitiveness to full- blown glory of proplietic instinct, is the choicest pearl of Biblical eth- ics, and together with the fervently advocated brotherly love, pleads most eloquently Judea's claim as the first moral preceptor of antiquity. "As long as the world lasts,'' declares a modern Bible bard— Matthew Arnold — " all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowiug and strongest. The Hebrew race has found the revelation ueeded to breathe emotion into the laws of moral- ity and make morality religion. This revelation is the capital fact of the old Testament and the source of its grandeur and power. For, while other nations had the misleading idea that this or that, other than righteousness, is saving, and it is not; that this or that, other than conduct, brings happiness, and it does not ; Israel had the true idea, that righteousness is saving, that to conduct belongs happiness." "WHAT THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES HAVE WROUGHT, ETC. 45 Let US now briefly demonstrate to what degree humanity is in- debted to Hebrew Scriptures for some other gifts not so generally accredited to Judaism by the envy of modern skeptics. On Judea's soil, that green oasis in the desert of yore, first blos- somed and flourished the lilies of actual culture aud civilization. There blossomed the bud of polite arts, of the so much boasted sciences of later Greece and plagiarizing Rome. The flowers of stately rheto- ric, thrilling drama, captivating song, lyric poetry, fervent psalmody, and rhythmic prose, not to speak of legend and fable, myth and para- ble, metaphor aud hyperbole, wit and humor, sarcasm and allegory, and minor subdivisions of graphic and sentimental love — all thrived and matured in its fertile grounds. Greece and Rome, of classic art and pagan splendor, with their skilled adepts in letters and all manner of research, with their magnetic orators, powerful rhetoricians, world- famed poets, and romantic historians, were indebted to humble Israel for that reputed familiarity with profound philosophy and cognate learning. Imbued with a spirit of hero-worship, the archaic visionary is wholly lost in the alluring vistas of Greek and Roman genius, and is but with pardonable reluctance argued into discarding his fixed and cherished convictions as regards the superiority of Hellenic and Au- gustan culture. Can, however, Plato, Demosthenes, Cato, Cicero, and other thunderers of eloquence, compete with such lightning-rods of magnetic power as Moses, David, Isaiali, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, aud other poet-orators of Bible times? Who wrote nobler history, Moses, Livy, or Herodotus? Or are the dramas and tragedies of Sophocles, ^schylus, Euripides, worthy of classification with the masterpieces of realism and grand cosmogonic conceptions furnished us in the soul- vibrating account of Job's martyrdom? In poetry aud hyranology, the harp of David is tuned to sweeter melody than Virgil's ^neid or Horace's Odes. Strabo's accurate geographical and ethnological accounts are not more thorough in detail than Scriptural narratives and the famous tenth chapter of Genesis. The haughty philosophical maxims of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, aud Seneca fade into insignificance before the edifying discourses and moral chidings of Koheleth, whose very pessimism, in contradistinction to heathenish levity, failed not to in- spire and instruct. Compare the ethics of Aristotle with those pure gems of monition to truth, righteousness, and moral chastity contained in the Book of Proverbs, and confront even the all-conquering intel- lect of Socrates with Solomonic wisdom. "The zephyrs of Attica were as bland, and Helicon and Parnassus were, as lofty aud verdantj before Judea put forth her displays of learning and the arts, as after- 46 THEOLOGY. wards." Yet no Homer was ever heard reciting his vibrating strains of poetry until David, Isaiah, and other monarchs of genius and soul- culture, poured forth their sublime symphonies in the Holy Laud ; yet none of all the muses breathed their inspiration over Greece till the Spirit of the Most High had awakened the Soul of Letters and of Arts in the uatiou of the Hebrews. Not to Egypt, Phoenicia, or Syria do Greece^ and her disciple, Rome, owe their eminence in the entertaining and refined branches of learning. They flourished at a period so re- mote that fable replaces fact, and no authentic records — chiefly ob- tained through a comparatively new field in modern exploration — are extant, wliich establish an impartial priority of culture and science before the Hebraic age. Egypt is accredited with far too much distinction in knowledge, which she never possessed in any eminent degree. Recent excavations and discoveries from ruins of her ancient cities tend to corroborate our view. A mass of inscribed granite, a papyrus roll, or a sarcophagus bears the tell-tale message of her standard in taste and her progress in art. "They prove," says an erudite commentator, " that if she were entitled to be called the Cradle of Science, it must have been when science, owing to the feebleness of infancy, required the use of a cradle. But when science had outgrown the appendages of bewilder- ing and tottering infancy, and had reached matured form and strength, Egypt was neither her guardian nor her home. Many of Egypt's works of art, for which an antiquity has been claimed that would place tliem anterior to David and Solomon, have been shown to be comparatively modern; while those confessedly of an earlier date have marks of an age which may have excelled in compact solidity, but knew little or nothing of finished symmetry or grace.'' Architecture, the boast of Greece and the pride of Assyria, whose stately palaces of Nineveh are to this day the marvel of the world, at- tained its loftiest summit of perfection in the noble structure reared by Israel's mighty king in Jerusalem, of which the holy tabern:icle mounted by the Cherubim of peace and sanctity was the magnificent model. No one acquainted with the history of the Hebrews can question their pre-eminence in this noble art. The proof of it is found in the record that endureth forever. Though the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed before Greece became fully adorned with her splendid architecture, the plan which had been given by inspiration from heaven, and according to which the peerless edifice was built, remains written at full length in Hebrew Scriptures. The dimensions, the form and proportion of all the parts, are described with minute exact- ness. Every thing that could impart grandeur, grace, symmetry, to- WHAT THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES HAVE WROUGHT, ETC. 47 the art palace of worship, and which made it to be called for ages "the excellency of beauty," was placed in the imperishable volume,^ to be consulted by all nations and in all ages. ' Wherever we turn, in fact, we are forcibly reminded of Israel's precious legacies to mankind in almost every department of industry. We must ever return and sit at the feet of those Hebrew bards, who, as teachers, as poets, as truthful and earnest men, stand as yet alone — unsurmouuted and unapproached — the Himalayan mountains of man- kind. And why not strive through the coming ages of mortal eternity, in fraternal concord and harmonious unison with all the nations of the globe ? Not theory but practice, deed not creed, should be the watchword of modern races, stamped with the blazing characters of national equity and unselfish brotherhood. Why not, then, admit the scions of the mother religion, the Wandering Jew of myth and harsh reality, into the throbbing affections of faith-permeating, equitable peoples, now inhabiting the mighty hemispheres of culture and civil- ization ? It was at Jacob's historical well, we feel constrained to remind the waverers, that three herds clamored to allay their burning fever- thirst for the water of rejuvenating life — quenched by the timely as- sistance of the patriarch "Israel," who with firm, unhesitating force removed the heavy stone obstacle resting on its mouth. Three relig- ions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — imbibed the liquid of en- lightenment from that virgin spring of truth, and yet they are distinct, estranged from each other by dogmatic separatism and a fibrous ac- cumulation of prejudices, which yet awaits the redeeming champion of old, who, with the Herculean grasp of irrevocable conviction, should hurl far away the lead-weight of passion and bigotry, of malice and egotism, from the historical streams of original truth, equity, and righteousness. Three religions and now many more gathered at the sparkling fountain of a glorious enterprise in the cause of truth, con- gregated beneath the solid splendor of a powerful throne, wherein reclines the new monarch of disenthralling sentiment — a glorious sov- ereign of God-anointed grace — to examine and to judge with the im- partial scepter of Israel's holiest emblem — ^justice — the merits of a nation who are as irrepressible as the elements, as unconquerable as- reason, and as immortal as the starry firmament of eternal hope. The scions of many creeds are convened at Chicago's succoring Parliament of Keligions, aglow with enthusiasm, imbued with the courage of ex- piring fear, electrified with the absorbing anticipation of dawning light. The hour has struck ! Will the stone of abuse — a burden ■lo THEOLOGY. brave Israel has borne for countless centuries — on the rebellious well of truth at last be shivered into merciless fragments by that invention of every-day philosophy — the gunpowder of modern war — rational conviction ; and finally — O, blessed destiny ! — establish peace for all faiths and unto all mankind? Who knows? THE DOCTBINE OF IMMORTALITY IN JUDAISM. 49 THE DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY IN JUDAISM. By rabbi JOSEPH STOLZ, of Chicago. • Man's personal immortality was always an established belief in Israel. Throughout all his long history we search in vain for a period when this doctriue was not affirmed, believed, or defended by the Jew. The voluminous literature of Judaism is unanimous on the subject. It has the sanctioa of priest and prophet, bard and sage. Rabbi and people. It is confirmed by precept and by ritual practice. It is supported by the testimony of nearly two hundred generations. This assertion, so positive and unequivocal, would not require substantiation were it not for the oft-repeated statement that the Jews believed not in eternal life. Yet, if modern researches prove that all ancient nations and tribes believed in a personal immortality, and if ethnologists tell us that no tribe so savage has yet been found but has some conception of a life after death (v. Tylor's Primitive Culture, vol. II, p. 21), it would indeed be surpassingly strange that the Jews alone should have been ignorant of the deathlessness of man, when their fundamental conception it was, that man is a duality, and that what constituted the essence of man was the D'TT nO£J*.5, " the breath of life," which God, The Eternal One, Himself breathed into the body of clay (Gen. i, 27), hence a h^^t^D illSi^ phtl, " a portion of God Himself," a force as deathless as God ; wherefore death could not pos- sibly have meant annihilation, but simply a separation of l)ody and soul, as it is said in Ecclesiastes, " and the dust returns to the earth as it was and the spirit returns unto God who gave it" (Eccles. xii, 7 ; cf also Gen. xxxv, 18, and Jer. xv, 9). If, as is demonstrated in the Anthropological collection at Jackson Park, the primitive Amer- ican Indians and the wild inhabitants of Australia and the Pacific Islands believe that death is not the end of man, how much the more should they have nursed that belief who could conceive of the One, Absolute, Most Holy God, the loving Father of all mankind, who could think of revelation, prophecy, prayer, and providence, and who could dream of the day when there would be no more war and all men would be united by the bonds of love and truth and justice ; yea, could dream of a World's Parliament of Religions (Micah iv). If the 4 50 THEOLOGY. primitive Chaldeans, Assyiians, and Babylonians could not believe that death ends all conscious existence (v. Sayce's Hibbert Lectures, 1887, pp. 358, 362, 365), how could their Semitic brethren* who felt that the soul was capable of infinite possibilities, and could and should rise on the wings of holiness from the creature to the child of God, ever have believed that death puts a sudden and lasting stop to the devel- opment of man, no matter whether like Esau he despised his birth- right and ate and drank, for on the morrow he might die, or whether like Jacob by dint of supreme self-denial and a struggle with powers, divine and earthly, he rose from a spoiled, crafty, selfish boy to the dignity of a prophet, a champion of God ? Starting out from general principles, it is simply impossible to think that they who conceived God as the Righteous Judge of all the earth (Gen. xviii, 25), the moral Ruler of the Universe who rewnrds righteousness and punishes guilt (Ex. xxxiv, 6. 7), the Supreme Gov- ernor to whom all nations and individuals are responsible (Exod. xviii, 11), the All Good One whose mercy eudureth forever (Ps. cxviii, 1), did not at some period of their history arrive at the conclusion that there must come a day when all the injustices of this earth will be righted, when the righteous who suffei'ed and the wicked who pros- pered will be rewarded or punished according to their individual merits. We must consider the broad, unifying principles of Scriptures and not bind ourselves hand and foot to isolated texts and disjointed metaphors, a slavery which has long been the curse of religion; for even tyranny has found texts to engrave upon her sword, and slavery has carved them upon iier fetters, and cruelty has bound them to her faggots, though freedom and love and mercy are fundamental priuci- j>les underlying the whole system of Biblical ethics. If God, the Father .(Mai. ii, 10), is eternal (I Chrou. xx, 10), an oft-recurring Biblical idea (Exod. xv, 18; Deut. xxxiii, 21; -Isai. xl, 28; Ps. xc, 2), then it is self-evident that man, the son of God (Deut. xiv, 1), can not perish lijce the flowers of the field. If God, the Creator, is eternal, then the child of God that is spirit of His spirit (Num. xvi, 22), life of His life, and light of His light (Ps. xxxvi, 10), that cau commune with Him, speak to Him face to faCe, . ® That the primitive Semites believed in the deathlessness of man is evident from their custom of making incisions into the flesh, cutting off the hair, and rending the garments, by means of which the living entered into an enduring covenant with the dead. v. AV. Robertson Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, pp. 304, etc., 317, etc. THE DOCTRIXE OF IMMORTALITY IN JUDAISM. „ 51 uuderstaud His divine message, behold His glory, walk in His ways, and become holy like Him, must be as deathless as is the Source of this power. The Bible does not in so many words draw this inference. It takes it for granted as a self-evident truth, as it takes for granted the existence of God, without ever attempting to prove it by any philo- sophical or scientific arguments. Of this there can be no doubt, even though, for reasons that will appear later, the Old Testament main- tains a discreet and commendable silence about the future life ; for like fossils that reveal to us the condition of things that existed when none are left to tell of them, are there imbedded here and there in the old Scriptures, traces of a popular belief in life after death that reach down to the very dawn of Hebrew life. When the Pentateuch says that "Abraham went in peace to his fathers" (Gen. xv, 15), though he was not buried in Ur of the Chal- dees, and that Aaron and Moses were "gathered unto their people " (Numb, xxvii, 13), though their bodies were not interred in Canaan, these words can only signify that death had not annihilated their an- cestors. Saul would never have asked the witch of Endor to conjure up the spirit of Samuel, long after he had died, and he would not have' said to Saul, " To-morrow thou and thy sons will be with me" (I Sam. xxviii, 19), had immortality not been a general belief among Israel- ites. Nor would Moses have prohibited " inquiring of familiar spirits and communing with the dead" (Deut. xviii, 11; cf Isai. Ixv, 4 ; Ps. cvi, 29) and Saul have found it necessary to enforce the law (I Sara, xxviii, 3), had the people not believed in a conscious existence after death. Were not a belief in immortality current, the people would not have told of the dead children Elijah and Elisha re-animated by bringing the departed soul back into the lifeless body (I Ki. xvii) ; nor would they have repeated the story that Elijah went alive into heaven (II Ki. ii, 19) ; nor would David have said to his servants : " I shall go to him (his dead child), but he shall not return to me" (II Sam. xii, 23). " It is not true that the concept of immortality is unknown in the Old Testament," says Schenkel in his Bibellexikon (5, 579) ; and in his Bampton Lectures on the Psalter (1889), Cheyne corroborates the state- ment (pp. 383-409). The story of "the tree of life" (Gen. iii, 22) attests a belief among the Israelites in the possibility of escaping death (ibid., p. 383). In his last song Moses makes God say, "I kill and I make alive, I have wounded and I heal" (Deut. xxxii,39) ; and Hannah says, " The Lord killeth and maketh alive, He bringeth low and also lifteth up" (I Sam. ii, 7); Isaiah declares, "He hath swallowed up 52 THEOLOGY. death forever" (i. e., life is eternal), (xxv, 8) ; and again he says, "The dead shall live, my dead bodies shall rise. Awake and sing ye that dwell in the dnst, for thy dew is as the dew of the herbs and the earth shall cast forth the dead" (xxvi, 19). Hosea (vi, 2) and Ezekiel (xxxvii) refer to a national resurrection (which of course implies the possibility of the resurrection of individuals), and many Psalms (16, 17, 49, 73) unmistakably advance the idea of a personal immortality and resur- rection, from the motive of moral compensation. In Proverbs (xii, 28) we find the word "Al-Maveth " ((mO-^K), " immortality ;" and Job speaks of a super-mundane Justice which will one day pronounce in favor of the righteous sufferer not only in this world (xvi, 18. 19; xix, 25; xlii), so tiiat all may recognize his innocence, but also be- yond the grave, the sufferer himself being in some undefined way brouglit back to life in the conscious enjoyment of God's favor (xiv, 13. 15; xliv, 26. 27 ; v. Cheyne's Psalter, p. 442). As time advanced, the im- mortality idea became more and more pronounced and definite. Koheleth says: "And the dust shall turn to dust as it was and the spirit to God who gave it" (xii, 7), which Daniel explains further in the words: "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall wake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (xii, 2). But the development of Judaism did not stop with the last page of the Bible. Judaism is a religious force penetrating the ages, and no man, no book, no Temple, no Synod, no national catastrophe, and no persecution or oppression could ever stem or destroy it. The final word was not spoken when Malachi closed his lips, and there is more than a fly-leaf between the Old and the New Testaments. The in- terim is pregnant with development, and many an idea that was only embryological in the Old Testament period, then reached a fuller and more pronounced growth. Particularly is this the case with the im- mortality-idea. Influenced by contact with the Parsees and Greeks as well as by the untoward political events that brought so much unde- served suffering upon the righteous and pious, great stress is henceforth laid upon the future life, and the first real attempts are made to define and describe it and give it a philosophical expression. The Apocryphal book, the Wisdom of Solomon, is a " gospel of immortality." " The sinner falleth and shall not rise, but those that fear the Lord shall rise unto eternal life and their life shall be in the light of the Lord and shall not fail" (iii, 13. 16). "The Lord's ' Hasidim ' shall inherit life in gladness; the inheritance of sinners is Hades and darkness and destruction" (xiv, 6. 7). "The sinners THE DOCTRINE OP IMMORLALITY IN JUDAISM. 53 shall perish in the day of the judgment of the Lord forever, but those that fear the Lord shall find mercy and shall live by the compassion of their God" (xv, 13, 15). "They shall 'live forever' not by tasting ambrosial fruit or following ritual practices, but by ' walking in the law which God commanded us'" (xiv, 1. 2), a principle em- bodied almost literally in the second Benediction over the Law. The Book of Enoch, which in the main is of pre-Christian ori- gin and belongs to the second century B. C, not only expresses a be- lief in immortality, but even describes quite minutely the future lot of the righteous and the wicked. (Ch. xxii, 102, 103 ; cf. Cheyne, ibid., p. 413; Schwally's Das Leben nach dem Tode, p. 148). The second and the fourth books of the Maccabees tell how the seven martyred brothers " live unto God " and "now stand before the throne of God and lead the happy life." And then to cap the climax, Josej)hu8 tells us that already in the second century, the doctrine of immortality was so prevalent that three sects quarreled about it. The Pharisees believed in future rewards and punishments, and the continuance of the soul ; tiie Sad- •ducees, who lived in the visible present and not in an imagined future, denied this ; while the Essenes believed that the spirits of the righteous would no more be burdened with bodies, but would rejoice and mount upwards (Ant. xviii, 1. 3; Wars ii, 8. 14; cf. Wise's Judaism and Christianity, p. 71 ; iii, 5. 8). Passages in the Targum, Midrash, and Talmud, which are undeniably early traditions, the Apocalyptical Books, the writings of Philo and Aristobul, the second of the eighteen Benedictions, the second benediction over the reading of the Thora, the oldest funeral service and funeral rites, all furnish positive proof that a belief in immortality existed in Israel prior to the time of Jesus ; yes, the 'fact that Jesus and his apostles teach the doctrine of immor- tality in the very Avords of the Pharisees, shows that it was from Israel that they derived this doctrine, and that even if an innocent man crucified and pierced with a spear, had not arisen after the third day, it would still have been known that death is not the end of man. (v. iWise's Second Commonwealth, p. 260, and Proselytizing Christ- ianity, p. 34). The resurrection-story never had a particle of influ- ence upon the Jew or Judaism, and yet the rabbinical writings, from beginning to end, are full of allusions to the future life. Maimonides codified the doctrine in his Yad Hahasaka (H. Teshuba, ch. viii), and embodied it in his creed; the medieval philosophers coined a new word for it, and, without exception, defended and defined it; the Kab- balists reveled in pictures of the life to come; Moses Mendelssohn proved it from his own philosophical standpoint ; and to my knowl- 54 THEOLOGY. edge, there is not a nineteenth century Jewish, orthodox, or reform preacher, teacher, or author of a catechism or prayer-booli that has denied it. It runs through the whole history of Judaism, through every pliase of its development, from the very beginning down to the Pittsburg Conference, which declared (Art. vii) : " We re-assert the doctrine of Judaism that the soul is immortal, grounding this belief on the divine nature of the human spirit which forever finds bliss in righteousness and misery in wickedness.'' Just as unanimous, however, is the Jewish idea that the canon of ethics and worship must not be based upon the doctrine of im- mortality. " Be not like servants who serve their master for the sake of the reward" (Pirke Aboth i), has never been disputed. That is not the highest morality which does tlie good for the sake of future hap- piness or out of fear for future punishment (v. Maim. H. Tesh., ch. x). Ethics must stand on a higher basis than that of selfishness. It must not be an insurance to bring one into heaven or a gate to keep one out of hell. That makes morals immoral and worship a blas- phemy. Nor must the center of gravity be changed from this world to another because there is a life after this. This life is not to be shunned and our duties here are none of tliera to be slighted because there is a hereafter. We have no right to separate ourselves from so- ciety and seek seclusion in deserts and caves; we have no right to mortify the flesh and make ourselves useless in this world because there is another world. The Rabbinical dictum is that " tiiis world is the vestibule to the next" (P. Aboth iv, 16), and that " every right- eous man will be rewarded according to his own merits" (Sab. 152 a). Our life here fashions our life hereafter. That explains the Mosaic silence. Moses, who was an eye-wituess to the frightful inequalities and injustices sanctioned in Egypt because the whole stress of religion was there laid upon the other world, purposely ignored the hereafter, so as to inculcate the doctrine that man must perform his social and private duties in this world, and seek perfection here, and then the hereafter will take care of itself, for it is but a continuance of this life. Describe it no one can. ■" The secret things belong to the Lord our God ouly, the things revealed belong to us" (Dent, xxix, 28). Hu- man intelligence can not comprehend a state of existence purely spiritual, wiierefore human words can not define the nature of spiritual reward or punishment, uor describe the place where the souls of the departed abide; yet many Rabbis have pictured to us Heaven and Gehenna, with all their good and bad spirits, all their spiritual and material pains and pleasures. This was the special delight of mystic THE DOCTRINE OH IMMORTALITY IN JUDAISM. 55 minds, and our literature is full of their queer musings, which, by the way, made a much stronger impression upon Christians and Moham- medans than upon Jews, because the Jewish rationalists were many that, like R. Johanan, repudiated tiiera all as idle sjjeculation, sayiug that " all the prophets prophesied about the future of the human fam- ily on earth, but as to the state of existence hereafter no eye has ever seen it but God's" (Ber. 34b). Vain is it to attempt a description of the future life, and Mairaonides sums it all up well when lie says: "In the future world there is nothing corporeal; every thing is spiritual ; -wherefore there can be no eating and no drinking, no standing and no sitting (hence no local heaven and no local hell). These phrases are .but figurative expressions, to make abstract concep- tions concrete to childish minds" (H. Tesh. v.; cf. Ber. 17a). Fu- ture joy is all spiritual joy, the happiness that comes from wisdom and good deeds; future pain is all spiritual pain, the remorse for ig- norance and wickedness. The joy is eternal, because goodness is everlasting; the pain is temporal, because "God will uot contend for- ever, neither will He retain His anger to eternity" (Ps. ciii, 9). The Jews never taught the eternity of suffering and chastisement. They know naught of endless retributive suffering. Sheol was simply the abode of the spirits of all who died. An eternal hell-fire was alien to them. Some denied the existence of Gehenna altogether (Ned. 8b). Others said the duration of its punishment was but twelve months (R. H. 15b). And others said there was but the span of a hand's distance between heaven and hell, so that it may be very easy for the repentant sinner to pass into paradise. > There was no authorized dogmatic Jewish teaching on the subject of endless punishment; the views of each Rabbi depended upon his interpretation of Scriptures and upon the results of his owu reflec- tions (v. Hamburger's Real-Encyclopadie, II, art. Vergeltung). All are agreed without exception that ^i D7"iyn mOIK ♦I^DIl NSn Dbli^7 p/fl-Dn? (cf. A. Z. 10b), all of clean hands and pure hearts, whether they are Jews or non-Jews, whether it is Confucius or Buddha, Socrates or Plato, Jesus or Mohammed, or Moses and Isaiali, all that feel and think and act to the best of their ability, will ascend the mountain of the Eternal and behold the eternal glory of God there, where all is not passive rest, but where the pious can rise from moral height to moral height until they approach the perfection of God (Ber. 64b) 56 THEOLOGY. JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS. By EABBI L0U18 GROSSMAN, D.D., DETROIT, MICHIGAN. I cau not tell how otliers who have spoken here in this Jewish section have felt, and I will not take it upon myself to criticise in advance those of the other denominations who are likely to take the platform after ns ; but I. imagine the most of them will be under the impression that they ought on this special occasion to say only such things as they believe to be final, and remembering that this Congress suggests a retrospect of four hundred years, they are probably dis- posed to emphasize those matters which they judge to be earnings of these Centuries and which they believe to be incontrovertible facts of religion up till now. Of course there is quite a latitude in the judg- ment of the mental, surely of the sentimental, coin of an age which circulates and siistains mental intercourse; I can not help feeling a mild degree of that same distrust against such a gratuitous undertaking which has caused so much mischief in less critical times ; in fact, in all the history of religions. For who can determine what, after all, is only a vague desideratum, and who can say with any sort of precision what is felt and believed by a multitude? One of the most unsatis- factory things in the world is a snap-shot photograph of the world's mind. Tiiought is fluid, and when we speak of habits and tempera- ments, of convictions and principles, we ought to know that we are speaking of matters which are largely convenient fictions. There is a modern scholasticism which is not much less professional and which is as tradesmanlike as that of notorious memory. All that we know is history, biography, facts. Motives elude our detective philoso- phy to-day as they ever did, and the analysis of them is as abstract a piece of work just as regrettably to-day as it was a fatal piece. of guess-work in the age of witchcraft. We still scent spirits every- where. "We are not entirely helpless, however, to establish what are the subtle facts of society. We can not dig out of the bosom of people with all our theological acumen the ore of their precious life as miners dig from the bowels of the earth, but somehow all popular thought and all popular feeling become manifest. It is the same old story ; mys- tery is a defiant giant. We close with it at first in an exasperated JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OP COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS. 57 struggle, perhaps we succeed in manacling him, and we think we have overcome him because we have bound him ; but we may iiave his bodj', we have not his will ; we have his submission, not his co- operation ; just as tyrants have the slavishness of their subjects, not their manhood. Neither compromise nor bribery accomplish much ; persuasion, justice, and love are the final and real conquerors. The history of theology is a history of policy, of fight, of truce, of Jesuit- ism, of enslaving and of enslaved. The theologians arrogate to them- selves a precarious domination, but the word finally dominates them. The disengaged fiction is ungovernable ; the haunting fancy is vin- dictive. None of us can afford to be positive. There are royal laws in this ordered world; but there are also imperial as well as imperious exigencies. Truth is administrative, not tyrannical, and all around us are myriad instances of adaptation and of accommodation, of com- promise, of the ideal, which ought to be, with a practice, which can be. Institutions are precipitates of movements of mind. The sewing machine, the steam engine, the telephone, the altar, the temple, the church, the painting, the statue, and the pantheon, the flute of the shepherd, the church-choral and the oratorio, are historical facts of social psychology. The world needed more expeditious work, wanted to release many plodding laborers from employment as unprofitable as it was degrading, wished to beautify life for the multitude and to en- noble it and to add power to it, and to vitalize the communities, and the world got the labor-saving machines, the life-saving institutions and quickening and enriching inventions. The people supplied what the people needed. The history of want is implied into history of in- vention and discovery. Not that the people was conscious definitely of what it needed, but the subtle factors of society gave birth to the fact. The vague experimentalism of an epoch at last comes upon a thing it has dreamt of and for which it has yearned, and the presenti- ment, undefined yet strong, has its fulfillment like an oracle whose words grow out of mystery into sense. Let us never speak of a religion as if it were a final thing, which the reason of man has established as unalterable. I fear the pretty notion of revelation has misled us. We have enlarged the primeval fancies, but we have not improved on them. As soon as we begin to gauge our sentiments, we depreciate, them. It makes no diflTerence whether we credit absolute value to our favorite religion or are more modest and content ourselves with a discreet contrast of it with other religions. We ought to tolerate neither a monopoly nor a tariff on truth. Judaism can not be charged with ever having been extravagantly 58 THEOLOGY. self-assertive. The spirit of assumption is foreign to Jewish thought- Throughout tlie extent of Jewish history, there is not one period of intense dogmatism. The policy of legislation which Moses pursued WIS in the interest of national integrity, more than for a domineering priest-religion. The origin of the new sect of Christianity right out of the heart of Judaism was attended with less throes than ever at- tended a like moinentous birth. The contagion of medieval zealotry never could inoculate Jewish earnestness with more than a passing spasm of foolish dissentions of a handful of Talmudists against a handful of Maimouidiaus. Nowhere, neither iu ancient nor in modern, not even in recent polemics, as soon as Jewish thought and life had assumed a character of its own, was there any division in Judaism as to what in dogmatic terminology we call articles of faith. The differences of opinion were rather as to system and classification than as to fact, and all sides deferred to the com-mon tradition, that absolute truth may be stated, but must never be legislated. " I am the Lord thy God," the ten commandments declare, but do not en- join. Perhaps, in no more distinctive matter than this, the differ- ence between Judaism and Christianity is clear. The Bible in Juda- ism is a source of august legislation ; to the Talmudists it was the source. To Christianity it is more ; to all schools of its thought and. iu all its sects the Bible is the origin and the finality of thought-life. Not so among Jews. You will remember how the Talmud exercises- itself over the problem of the resurrection of the dead, a problem at once sentimental as well as philosophic (as such theosopiiic notions generally are). But in all the desperate attempts there made to dis- cover in, and even to import some suggestions of it into, the text, the Rabbis intimate that they would feel themselves amply content if they could procure the biblical prestige for the doctrine, they never aspire to arrogate to it authority by showing its biblical authenticity. We, who have been disciplined in modern ways of thought, may find it ,difl3cult to think ourselves into the economy of a sect which foregoes- authority as to belief. Nevertheless, it is true, Judaism has never enforced faith. Jewish Ministers are often called upon to define Judaism, and the large number of them respoud by giving the history of Jewish thought; but if we were frank, we would, without hesita- tion, confess that literally there is no such thing possible as a Jewish Catechism. Every codification of Jewish principles has met with op- position ; every statement of them has been received with distrust by Some if not with positive disfavor ; and Jewish Synods have never established any thing except that which the laity had anticipated by self-assumed validity, tolerated too long to be dislodged. Perhaps the- JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS. 59 notoriety o# the abortive Pittsburg Cjnference lias its explanation in this. It is interesting to notice how contemporary discussions among Jews between orthodoxy and reform (divisions which are as ancient as thought is) circle about practice — cliurch-practice, temple-practice — and comparatively less about dogma and articles of belief, certainly with a lesser degree of severity and precision. The famous dispute between Gamaliel, the Nafesi, and Rabbi Joshua, and that between the followers of Nachraanides and of Maimonides, if we lay bare the real facts which the denunciations now reported to us suggest; the im- passioned rigor of Beruays in Hamburg and of Herschel in London ; and most noticeably the vapid airings we are victimized by in the cur- rent Jewish press — all point not only to the fatal foibles incident to theological disputations, in which the Jewish instances share with the rest of denominational fanatics, but more so to the philosophical fact that there is in Judaism an entire absence of an accentuation by any mutually recognized authority what are and forever must be the in- controvertible and substantially absolute doctrines of our faith. The convenient, though otherwise quite unimpugned and of course decidedly reverend, " hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, God is one," smacks of controversialism. We are too unclear wheu and how it originated and what is its exact meaning, and we are not entirely agreed whether we can accept it as a satisfactory statement in any final way, either of Jewish transcendentalism or of the Jewish spirit of religiousness. We have then here a phenomenon, the like of which we would search for in vain among the many religions which have been active in the history of the world with any similar degree of influence. We must remember that Judaism has exerted an undeniable influence on almost the whole world, and does still exert influence, at least by the proxy of Christianity, despite its aversion to system and catechism, and that it has thriven in the heart of the Jewish peoi^le with a vital- ity which is the wonder of the world. There is something instinctive about the Jewish temperament, and the domestic and "social atflliations of the Jews. The solidarity of the Jewish people has been impertur- bable, and this fact, eminent in itself, grows into proportions beyond conventional explanations, when we consider that this faithfulness to tradition and this sincerity and closeness of sentiment are supreme, though the dispersion of the Jews is as wide as the extent of empires and as diverse as the genius of nations, and that this unity has been accomplished and is maintained not by the administration from some- where and by some one. What I wish to emphasize in keeping the thread of our thought is, that no prescription of belief has done this, 60 THEOLOGY. that there has been, iu fact, an unhampered fi'eedom, a nfultifarious- ness of individual views, which would have wrecked many other de- nominations, and in fact has wrecked many. This diversity of opin- ions has been respected and has been deferred to with a readiness such as the Fathers of the Church would have chuckled over to the infinite felicity of their dogmatic souls. Many a magazine writer has indulged a harmless sensation by provoking the discussion on "What is Judaism ?" The jirobably well- meaning questioner, however, brings upon himself often the derision of the malevolent and the pity of the thoughtless. Frankness is often perverted and toleration is a burdensome virtue. The questioner is sincere enough and suggestive enough. Perhaps it is the glory of a denomination that it can constantly readjust itself to new conditions, that it can enfranchise itself readily in the new liberalism, when it hears the trumpet sound for fraternization with the family of the faiths with willing ear, perhaps, that, unincumbered by the burden of a pretentious absoluteness, it can naturalize itself as a citizen in the republic of thought. Perhaps, free from the exactions of a repressive despotism, it can feel the thrill soonest which shall some day send new vigor through the blood and tissue of natural associations. Perhaps Judaism, exactly in this and exectly at this time, when faiths are tested as never before they were tested, makes good the claim which it has made for so many centuries, that it is the religion of priestliness and that all the people are priests. Lastly, perhaps just because of this felicitous absence of all preclusive and exclusive teaching, Juda- ism can offer proof of its true merit and its acceptableness now more tlian ever. For the faiths are dwindling away in numbers and in prestige; authority is taken from some because they abused it, from others because they might abuse it, from some because they have for- feited their right to rule, having shown that they are slaves them- selves, from others because they manifest a lamentable lack of in- sight such as statesmen ought to have into social needs, social move- ments, and social exigencies. They failed because they leaned upon a reed which pierced their hands up to the very bone. Contracts were written so long as mutual confidence was impossible. To-day, bits of paper pass from hand to hand as matters of reliable honor, and integ- rity has made them into coin. So constitutions are written ; the pub- lic conscience then takes them out of Magna Charta and writes them into the heart of nations. We do not need paper; we need blood. So also the sects needed the creed, to make possible a sectarian integ- rity. But we want a free religiousness. Dogmas are words, and words must never manacle reason. Freedom is never a risk. The JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS. 61 coils of rhetoric have embarnissed men long enough. Dogmas are the ingenuities of unpractical pedants. Some day, ])erhaps, we shall classify transcendentalism as a delirious exiialtation, intense but morbid. Definition is the death of thought. It has been said by tliose who take comfort from contrasts that Christianity has shown a wealth of ac- commodation in the history of its teaching, and in the way it has natu- ralized among divers nations and climates ; and it has been cited as one of the evidences of its universality. Judaism, on the other hand, it has been alleged, is tribal. By that is meant that it has had potency in one people only ; that its compass has never gone beyond that of the Jewish people, and that Judaism, from the beginning up to the pres- ent, and, as is evident from the peculiar tenacity of the race, it will likely forever persist to be an isolated phenomenon. And that, it is claimed, is a weakness, and not a strength. It is true no Jew has ever shown eagerness for proselyting, though the first missionaries, and probably the most eminent among all mis- sionaries who ever lived, were Jews. It is true, also, that Christianity presents not only an eventful but a checkered history. At no period during the centuries from the origin to the present has the Christian world been unanimous. There has been no time in which the Christian church was not disrupted by sectarian disputes. It is also true that the spirit of denomination has had a long-continued luxuriance, the noisome growth of which has been any thing but an unmixed benefit. The theologies of the church arc as manifold as the national habitats in which they have thriven, and, in order to be fair, we must admit the fact that religion is often called upon to do political service in the furtherance of sociological aims. But we must remember that it is not Christianity which has promoted the intimacies between foreign nations, and that it is surely not to be credited with being the source of a modern spirit of internationalism. That did not come from the church, nor through the church, but in spite of the church. In fact, Romanism, eclesiasticism and state churches were fatal, not only to in- dividualism and the freedom, without which there can be no religious- ness, but they have been a bar to a wholesome interchange 'and inter- communication in the open world of thought. Nothing contributes more toward keeping England insular than the Westminster Confes- sion ; and the Catholic Church, or the Protestant Church, or the Uni~ versalist Church, each in its degree, is a dissolvent of the body politic and of the great fraternity of the nations. Judaism, it is said, depends for its life upon the solidarity of the Jewish people. Into what other soil would you plant religion, if not 62 THEOLOGY. into the affections and instincts of the people? From where else shall come its vitality? What a force must that religion be, and how psy- chologically correct, which maintains a bond of sympathy so strong and indissoluble, and for so long, as the bond has been between Jews, and which has sustained them through no elaborate organization or centralized administration. I doubt whether in the whole range of religious variations there is another denomination with so insignificant au equipment for denominational government. We have to-day in this country about a million of Jews, but no head for their ecclesiasti- cfll government, nor an authority over them to establish doctrine. Some people are so imitative in their disposition that, observing all around them that the churches and sects have each a complicated or- ganization and a canonical government, and seeing that we Jews are orphaned of the like, deplore it, and regret what they call the latitudi- uarian license rampant among us. But they do not understand Juda- ism. It has never tolerated task-masters, and its synods have never originated a single doctrine. For, if they had undertaken to prescribe and impose matters of belief, such is the moral health and mental acu- men and the spiritedness of the Jew, he would have resented the med- dling. The fact is, theological disputes never arise in a religious sect save when there is a denominational crisis. Let us never forget that when freedom is taken from some one, be it taken only i\orn one, the whole community is dishonored and enslaved. There is nothing which the Jew has felt more keenly by au instinct which, I suppose, is too natural to be accounted for, than that a man is inviolable, not onlv as to the property of his goods, but also as to the possessions of his mind, and to the integrity of his person. This guarded self-respect and cheerfully rendered deference breeds mutual justice, and upon this rock alone a church can be built. We cau estimate the value of a faith, and perhaps even its valid- ity, by determining how much it contributes to the radical discipline of the people, how it maintains the vigor of the national life. Religion is a sociological fact, and the religious tension of a na- tion is one of its re-enforcing or depressing factors, according to the quality of its soul-life. The day is gone by when we can settle the validity of a religion by a rule in mathematics or by a pretty syllogism. We have taken the crown from many heads, and we know, also, that the world's pulses beat with a healthier logic than that of priests and confessors. It is what a religion does for the world which validates it; how it serves, not merely by the inspiration of its great men (though the caliber of its geniuses and how many it has given to the world ought to go for something), but by the plodding of its unpretentious JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS. 63 laity. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean what preachers mean when they deliver unctions homiletics. In what degree the members of a sect live up consistently to the indoctrination of their church, is, of course, a matter of moment. Whether or not the moral system of a denomination is philosophically just and logically acceptable, and even practical and business-like, is decidedly an item of importance which none can afford to ignore, least of all the adher- ents of them. But beyond the question of reliability, beyond consid- erations which properly belong to students and to such as are pre- occupied with conventional standards of belief, is the item, what sort of social contribution does religion, or do religions, or does any specific religion, make to the life of the world? Religion, if it is any thing like a public factor, is ingrained into the moods and tempera- ment of the people, and its peculiar spirit is organized in all the social establishments which it has built up. The architecture of Egypt is as •distinct from the dignified architecture of Greece as the heavy and clumsy faith of the one is different from the bright and genial religion of the other. And the castes which divide off families there are not more indigenous to the soil along the Nile than are the Book of the Dead and the Sarcojjhagi in the Pyramids. The bravery of Mucins Scaevola is weird and madly faithful ; but no less appalling and sinis- ter is the Roman -spirit in all- other things. The legislation of the later republic has become fundamental in modern codices. The Ro- mans had a keen sense for organization and order, which was nursed l)y every citizen in his home under the shadow of the Penates. The spirit of Judaism is manifested- by the domestic virtues and tiie law- abiding sense of the Jews. Persecution cultivated a spirit of humility and the capacities of martyrdom, and emancipation and the deliver- ance from harrassing restraints freed the native brightness of the Jews and helped them at once to earn bread and fame. The same influences which endowed fathers and mothers with a sentimental purity, which nothing could taint, made the blood rush with quickened energy when the avenues of commerce, of professions, of public service, opened for employment and the ambitions were aroused. We have too narrow a view of ethics. We are siill in the arena of thought and sentiment when we talk of morals. The facets to a moral fact are many. Morals are the sum total of characteristics, not only as to how men conducted themselves when they had dealings with one another ; not only when they in common gave expression to a common joy or to a common grief or to a common indignation or to a common enthusiasm; not only in national poetry or literature or game of war, but also by the silent facts of institutions and tools. 64 THEOLOGY. The knife, for instance, as a tool, is a chapter of the history of morals as well as industrialism. The sharp blade of the savage, our table knife ; the straw matting, the downy bed ; the turf-covered hut and the house with paneled walls and frescoed ceiling — report morals a& niucli as convenience. We interpret archteological finds in caves and mounds as suggestions of something besides mechanical ingenuity men had in the pre-historic days. The spade, the tool of the industrious,, belongs to religious history as much as to economic. Conversely, every religious custom and ritual reflects the social status of the peo- ple ; culture and worsliip are interdependent. You will never find sacerdotalism except when notions of right by the grace of God pre- vail ; and the "Eights of Man " contravene as much the traditional sovereignly of the church as of tlie state. We can almost safely de- duce from the specific tone of the Mosaic dispensation what must have been the political status of the Israelites, iu which it had its birth as well as its life. Soaie day we may be able to construct from the data which we have in great amplitude of the rich and varied history of the Jewish people, ever since the dispersion out of Palestine into the world, a reliable soul-picture of Judaism. A given custom will fur- nish a more exact portrait of Jewish psychology, and disclose for us the mind and morals of the Jew with more relief, than would all the professional dissertations on tlie subject and scholastic analyses we have had as yet of it. The endless differences between reformers and orthodox, when sifted, amount to a disdainful deprecation on the one side, and unintelligent laudation on the other, of soraethiug, the exact nature of which neither conservatives nor radicals have grasped. A domestic right or a popular custom, or a Synagogue ritual, is an item of history, but it is also what the national or communal or denomina- tional spirit has precipitated into some form or habit. What for want of a better word we call the religious sense unfolds itself into church- forms and civil customs. He wlio summarily brushes them away a& meaningless, as well as he who sweeps them together as precious, is little aware how customs reveal a former living thought. The recu- perative powers of the social organism depend upon such stoi-age of the popular affections which has been laid away as hiddeu energy. We shall have to revise our notions of revelation. I deem this an eminently felicitous occasion. We have for a long time clung to a too restrictive scope of the idea of revelation. The untutored man implied by it a guess of the grand. He had come upon many a thorubush all aglow with a mystic message, and dared not approach nearer to it. We, ton, have profound visions ; our legislation is a farce and insincere, unless we have as prototype a state of order and JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS. 65 a communify in peace. Our theologies are impertinences, unless we have the ideal of piety. Socialism, ethics, politics, all pre-condition a sort of Utopian hope. Of course we fall short of these high aims. We say God gave the ten commandments from the top of Mount Sinai. But we know that the whole world is even at this late day far from a complete obedience to them. The magnificent visions into the har- mony of the universe, into the unity of the races, into the justice of the world, into the moralness of fate, poets and legislators and the popular instinct share alik«. From the cleft of the rock, shaded from the dazzling brightness of a divine illumination, each man sees a vision of his own. The whole world is revealing and all men are seers ; you say this is pantheism. I hope we are out of scholastic tournaments by this time. Philosophy, poetrj, the songs of nations, their frolic and their wails, and their mobs, and their armies, their tranquillity, and their rebellions, all develop subtle facts. My neigh- bor is an artisan ; he has made a piece of furniture, and he says : I am nothing but a tradesman. But the whole nation speaks through him. His trade, the work he is demanded to do, is a pulse of the nation. His skill is the wit of the nation ; his life is the wave of the vast throb of the great social system. Plane and saw, inventions and discoveries of the race, centuries of industry, have served him iu the single bit of work he does. The world-spirit gives birth to the Homunculus. Even speech, that, second soul of man, that pilgrims across con- tinents, making brothers of nations, reveals. The language of the world is the most reverent symbol of life we have. Every sound which now bridges mind with mind and fraternizes the world, is revela- tion. And there are so many languages. There is not one sentiment which we share in common but is coined into speech and binds the race more closely. That which makes manifest a common truth is biblical. The oracle, therefore, is given us from many tripods. I can readily understand how the natural instinct led the early man to people the world with Gods. The Bible speaks of the Sun in his majesty ; Homer seats him upon Mt. Parnassus. The presence of the inexhaustible overawes the mythology of a people, is as logical as it always is beautiful. The contemplation of the grand and the unusual is a synonym for revelation in the tradi- tional sense of the word. To-day we must learn to perceive deliver- ances of the world-spirit from the common and from that which passes by us every day and every night. Not alone from rocks and woods, from Sun and Moon. Schelling said that if we suppose that God communicated religion to man, we would also have to suppose that 5 66 THEOLOGY. there was a time wheu man had no religion, and consequently that man was originally atheistic. It would then be hard to understand how an atheistic person could have been susceptible to such a revela- tion. Prof. Tylor tells us how by nature we are disposed to feel as if the whole world and every thing in it were alive. Sleep is filled with dreams; even the dead haunt us. Spirits are all around as, and we feel kinship with every thing that is drawn into touch with us ; souls speak to us out of every thing. This may be coarse mythology, but ■man sees more than his eye does. There is mind behind the eye ; the delicate fibers swoon when black night puts its leaden touch on them. The mind can not be killed off; nothing save vice and death can deaden it. Still there is something more tenacious even than mind. The dead may be gone and things may molder, but recol- lection and memory are preservatives, respect and fear last, even if life does not. Herbert Spencer and Lippert speak of the awe man has for the departed, of the apprehension and the love or hate to chiefs who are dead, and how this state of mind is the germ for the worship- ful man. Fire, the flame from the matrix, the bolt from the cloudy sky, how did they come? asks the child-man, if not from God? The logic of man is always sound. We can not give any precise account of what we see. A residual quantity will always embarrass, us. Every trifle is endowed with a defiant mystery, and timid fellows will fall upon their knees, being always on the threshold of the inscrutable. The river that flows forever, the winds that. jostle each other over- head, the mountains hoary and high and solid, the forests thick and gloomy, in whose deep shade the serpents coil and lie in wait, and the liou with stealthy tread falls upon a victim to crush out its life, or slinks to the edge of the thick shrubbery — is he companion or foe; the broad sky and the myriad-eyed night ; the golden or the firy Sun and the silvery light through the winter's gray-haze; and the day and the next day and ceaseless time; and this child coming into life ; and the man moving in it and that one passing away ; the ocean and the large seas and the murmuring waves and the tossing storm, and in- finite expanse beyond the rocks that jut out with white foam above the crags up to the far distant sky — what is all this? The an- cient man had thousand Sinais, thundering, whispering, revealing God. I wish we Jews would give a hearty welcome to the new science of comparative religions. We can afford to do it, our faith does not contravene it, not even a single datum of it; we must indorse it, for it is a tradition with us that we feel GOD every-where, in the garden of Eden, before the tent of the Arab, on the mountain of Moriah in JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE EELIGIONS. 67 the burning bush of the desert, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on bleak Sinai, in luxuriant Kenaan, to the king, to Isaiah at home, to Ezekiel in exile. If Judaism contradicts that which the psychol- ogy of the world does not warrant, nay repudiates, then Judaism per- forms only a duty. Religion must not only be logical, but also psy- chological. There is only one way to tell what is a true and what is a false religion, how far do a man's thoughts or a man's feelings or these both relate to his organic make-up. The national and the social conditions feed and shape the national mood. The religious polity is built by the facts of national history. Mythologies are embodied fancies, but they are also embodied morals according as the national genius is strong or weak. Some say Judaism has no mythology, but we know better ; for Judaism is a re- ligion of disciplined instincts. Some say that Moses has dealt a death blow to art among the Jewish people; "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image," but we understand Moses better. The spirit of Art demands a large latitude. This latitude can be and often is contracted by the arrogance of a fashion, but then the instinct for the beautiful suffers. I love my distant friend though I never have seen him. I have nothing but what my imagination elaborates as to his person and appear- ance, but this fits every need ; he is with me when I laugh and he sits at my side when I am sad, and he is a true companion. In tranquil hours my fancy draws curves in the air and they conform according to the, throbbing of my pulse into a similitude of him, all my own ; but show me his photograph and the fancy is gone and felicity with it. His face is never more the same, live and companionable. I see the immobile features fixed, not living. Art is like a spring, you can not stop it from flowing, not even the finest of marble is art, and even the blackest of ebony may be shaped exquisitely. Beauty must be living, the sense of the inexpressible is opulent. That which you see you will own, which you see now, which perhaps you will never again see so, how rich it is. The thought we have of God by nature is more poetic than the one which has been cultivated in us. Some day the prose of the church will be translated back into the poetry of Religion. All religion is socialized wisdom. This the science of religion proves. I do not know whether even the combined contributions of Max Mueller, Tylor, Spencer, Chautepie de la Saussaye, Happel, Lip- pert, Steinthal, Bastian, and the rest have yet shown this fact. Some day the science of religion will go farther than simply to give an ac- count of the origin of religion. The history of religions will have a 68 THEOLOGY. broader compass. There obtains an intimacy between religion and politics. Catholicism has perverted this notion, and Protestantism, aware of the difficulty, has taken up the delicate relationship as a fisherman takes np a lobster, fearing tlie lacerating fangs. But the dispnte between Church and State is not after the features which they share in common, but as to those in which they seem to be irreconcila- ble. I do not wish to approach an unpleasant theme. I would rather suggest that which goes beyond issues. A religion prevails, has followers, makes converts, establislies a government, and exerts an influence only and so far as it is a social factor, and to the degree in which it serves to sustain the community. This gives it its economic, its political character, and gives it legitimacy. The question has been often asked, do the Jews constitute a nation ? The question implies vagueness as to what is meant by nation, and it shows also a lamentable want of information as to what Judaism is ; in fact, an intelligent judgment of what religion is, is required if we should dispose of the question properly. That which establishes and maintains a community partakes of the religious. In this experimental country of ours we often attempt to meet exigencies by statutory enactments ; legislation, however, never goes to the radical facts of social affairs. Habits can not be dislodged by the police ; no sort of formalism can touch temperament; there must be a common term either in the interests of occupation and em- ployment or in experience and history. The churches aggregate not through any radical congeniality of the votaries, but because there is a metaphysical parallelism of the believers, and for this reason the mod- ern sects have failed to contribute much to the real good, surely little to the discipline of the world. There can be no such thing as a formal faith orcatechismal confession, if it shall be a force in the world unless it be allied with the household of the people. The Jew has never tolerated a divorce of belief from character. Christianity has fostered this precarious duplicity. To the Jew the divine in man is at once absolute and creative. It is true, every religion has its own way to express itself, it has its peculiar terminology, it has its own ritual, which is a mode of ex- pressing its profound conceptions, it has its sectarian physiognomy ; but the language of a religion, tiiis manifold spee'ch by which it re- veals what it is, is most noticeably conveyed by the degree of intensity of its communal spirit. It is not centralized authority that makes a people solid. We have before spoken of the interesting fact that there is lacking in Judaism a supreme government. But the Jewish people have an identity of interests .as they have an identity' of raind. JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS. 69 The functious of religion have organized tliemselves iuto the Jewish family, into the Jewish community. Tlie religion has become social- ized. There is no point at which the Jewish spirit ceases to constrain obligation. Even the ancient Hebrew language, aside of the interest which it has from the standpoint of philology, is most engaging to the student of psychology. The subtlest facts of the national soul reap- pear in language. The idiom of a nation is its mirror. We respect the ancient Bibles because they report soai-life, which is neither ancient nor modern, but always the same. We respect tlie ancient' Bible of the Jews because it reports not only the status of ancient Jewish life, but because it reveals the exceptional fact that at a time least en- couraging to, and least susceptible to, a conception of pure morals, the Jews transcended the legitimate expectation with high credit. The Prophets are famous for their genius, but so ought also indeed have become the Jewish people for its genius in morals. Perhaps ortiiodoxy and reform might have to fight their battles upon quite another ground if their acrimony would leave them enough of consideration so that they would ascertain what after all the real issues between them are. There miglit be a new apology for customs and rites, perhaps even for traditional customs, perhaps also for the kind of religious worship, both domestic as well as congregational, by which Judaism has up till i-ecent times been so plainly marked. The laical practices, whether private or public, iiave served to discipline constitutionally and morally. The practices were minute and refined, and tinged the life and conduct of each member of the community. A man's life had become as it were politico-religious. The life of the individual was turned into an arm for the organization of the social unit. The legislation of Moses might be called an embodiment of social philos- ophy. It would be impertinent to readjust and to reform unless we in turn had in mind as thoroughly constructed an economic ideal. So long as we can not show that that which we wisii to put in place of the old is relevant to a social policy, we have no title for our reform- atory attempt. There is an interdependence between abstract notions, such as religion and faith have always been understood to be, and the practical or economic facts of the state. But the true religious facts are operative in the thousand-fold phases and incidents of the community. It may be supposed that I mean to say that the religious thought of a people, and its political practice are bound to one another only in the sense of ratio, that is true, but I mean more. Secular and sec- tarian mean at bottom the same thing, only from two different aspects. Where there was despotism in government there was also fatalism in religion, where life was easily sustained there was optimism, where life 70 THEOLOGY. is cheap there is no industry, where talents are rare there is no en- thusiasm, where there is phlegma there is pessimism, where there is artificiality there is transcendentalism. The origin of Christian- ity might be studied anew, the politics and the social status of that ' epoch ought to be more closely regarded. Palestine in the first century is not like Europe in the middle ages, nor are the ideals of the first likely to have been the same as those were of the second. A period of disruption can not breed a |tate of mind such as a period of organizaT tion does. The ascetic interpretation of the Christian faith is a dis- tinct phenomenon ; so also is the crude unformed state of Europe at the invasion of the Goths. It is sociology that tells the story of the origin of every movement, and also of the fate of each. Superficial observers call us a people, a nation, a race; we, however, know that ours is an exemplary instance and the only instance of a religion thoroughly political and social. If there is one thing which Jewish teachers, ever since Jehuda Halevi, have insisted upon, it is that Judaism respects history; that history is religion in solution. This we will persist to teach. Dogmas are losing their prestige. The nations have been weaned of that sort of violent discipline. The age of individualism has come. We need another method with which to organize tlie- world-life ; the church-prin- ciple is doomed not only because there is a multiplication of sects and a disintegration in each, but because each of them is in the main a school of metaphysics, with a bit of ritualism thrown in, without any relation with the vital influence and factors in national progress. Besides, the constituency is coerced by a certain prescriptive code in belief. Out of the very seat of social necessity must come its consti- tution. The law of gravitation holds throughout the world. The social organism will bear its church. Nature brings forth with pain out of her great lap. The martyrdom of saints, the disappointments of the hopeful, the grief of dreamers, the anguish of saints, broken hearts — over graves the spirit of life moves with reverent but firm step. There is much gossip about the identity of Judaism and Unitari- anism. I am sorry that there are Habbis who are so eager for a pre- mature universalism that they will hurry to engage in any sort of companionship. Not even the last form of the Christian church can ever be any thing else than Christian, and tiiat which is a link (let us say the last link) in the evolutionary chain of Christian philosophy, is radically, I say radically Christian. The difference between Judaism and every phase of Christian theology is clear enough. Judaism is not a chapter in the history of thought, not in the history of zeal ; it JUDAISM AND THE SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE EELIGIONS. 71 is the soul of the community which breaks out into all the moods and movements of the body politic, just as the soul of a man breaks through his flesh and bone. Judaism is not a protest against any school of thought. It is as peaceful as light, as germinal as life, as true as God. 72 THEOLOGY. THE FUNCTION OF PRAYER ACCORDING TO JEWISH DOC- TRINE. By EABBI I. S. MOSES. "To appreciate the poet, oue must go into the poet's land," is a German adage. To understand the character of a religion, one must study its prayers; to know the nature of a religious community, one must enter into the sacred precinct of their liturgy. Were to-day the history of Israel wiped out from the memory of men, were even the Bible to be obliterated from the literature of the world, the student of the science of comparative religion could reconstruct from a few pages of the Jewish prayer book the lofty faith of Israel, the grandeur of his moral teachings, and the main points of his historic career. What kind of men were they who would pray every morning: " Be praised, O God, King of the world, who hast not made me a slave?" They certainly had no reference to the poor creature bought and sold like merchandise ; for neither in old nor in later Israel was slavery so ex- tensive nor so abject as to call forth such a self-complacent benediction. During the long night of persecution, the position of the Jew was such as not lo compare favorably with that of a slave. The slave at least enjoyed the protection of his master, but the Jew during the middle ages was at the mercy of every rufEan who chose to insult him. Yet would he pray with grateful devotion to his Maker and rejoice that he has not been made a slave. Compared with his tormentors, he felt himself to be the free man spiritually and morally, far above those who thrust him into misery. Indeed, /reedom is the first note of Jewish worship ; a song of freedom was the first prayer which liberated Israel attuned to his God. " They shall be my servants ;" this divine assurance included the behest, not to be servants of men, not to fear their frowns, not to fawn their favor, but to obey the will of Him alone who has manifested Himself in Israel. The divine will is not hidden ; the divine law has been revealed and intrusted to the keep- ing of Israel. This consciousness of being the possessor of divine truth in the form of the Torah, is a source of unspeakable joy for the soul of the Jew ; from it he drinks ever new inspiration and new strength. Truth, therefore, or the Torah, is the second great element THE FUNCTION OF PRAYER ACCORDING TO JEWISH DOCTRINE. 73 in Jewish worship. Amidst all changes of fortune, in the face of direst distress, even in the agony of death, the Jew would look upon his lot as specially favored by God ; thanking Him for the great boon of having received the burden of the Law. In this law and in his obedience to it, he beholds his chief distinction, or election, before all other nations. Again and again the gladsome lone is struck that God has given the law to Israel. A few sentences from the evening service will be sufficient to illustrate this deep, intense love of the Jewish people for their sacred heritage. " With eternal love Thou iiast guided the house of Israel ; law and commandment, statutes and judgments, Thou hast taught us. Therefore will we constantly think of Thy law and rejoice in Thy teachings ; for they are our life and the lengthening of our days, and in them we will meditate day and night ; so may Thy love never depart from us." And even so in the morning service the chief petition is for il- lumination in the law. " Our Father, our King, as Thou hast taught our fathers the statutes of life, so graciously teach us. Enlighten our minds in Thy law, and unite our hearts to love Thy name. Enable us to understand, to appreciate, to listen, to learn, to teach, and to practice the words of Thy law in love." This, then, is the great longing of his soul, this the substance of his prayer, this the hidden fountain of his joyousness : to be able to understand and to carry out the law of his God ! If we did not know from history what the Jew has done and endured in his steadfastness and fidelity to the law, such prayers would reveal the fact. But the law is only the outward expression and examplification of a deeper truth, which is the center and soul of Jewish thought and life. That truth has been formulated at the very incipiency of tlie people, and has become the watchword and battle-cry, the sign of recognition and the sound of confession, for all the members of the Jewish faith ; it forms the central part of every divine service, private or public, and will cease to be uttered only with tiie last breath of the last Israelite on earth. The Sh'raa or the profession ofthe One God, is the formula of that truth which Israel first announced to the world ; the truth which inspired the souls of the Prophets, winged the imagination of the Psalmists, set aglow the hearts of the sages in their longing for a righteous life, which gave birth to two grand systems of religion professed to-day by the civilized nations of the earth. This truth is no mere theological postulate ; it is an ethical movement; for the declaration of the Oneness of God necessarily produces the idea of the oneness of humanity, or the brotherhood of man. "Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God," and " thou shalt love thy fellow-man as thyself," are only 74 THEOLOGY. two diiferent forms of expressing the same thought. lu this thougiit, then, lies the mission of Israel, this is the reason of his great joy when thinking that he has been deemed worthy to be the bearer of that mission. Therefore he exclaims: "Happy are we, how goodly is our portion, how pleasant our lot, how beautiful our heritage; happy are we who proclaim : Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." To freedom, law and truth is thus added a fourth element of wor- ship — Love ! Love to God and love to man. Among no other class of people has the sentiment of love found such a rich expression as among the Jews ; an expression not in words but in deeds. Filial love and reverence, honor and obedience, conju- gal love and fidelity, brotherly love and charity, are virtues to which the Jew has furnished the noblest illustration. From the depth of such a sentiment rose that portion of the Service which, because of its importance, is called "the Prayer." It is unique in form and sublime in its siiggestiveness : "Praised be thou, our God, and God of our fathers," our fathers' God — this expression is the noblest testimony to the tender and grateful heart of the Jew — "Thou art great, mighty and awe-inspiring, God, Most High." To the Jewish mind God is not a mere sentiment, but an overpowering reality, in whose presence the soul is awed to adoration, and can find but superlatives to clothe into words what stirs within : "Thou rewardest the good, rememberest the love of the fathers and briugest redemption to the children's chil- drea out of love. Thou alone art mighty and in Thy mercy givest life unto all ; Thou sustainest the living in Thy grace, supportest the fall- ing, healest the sick, loosest the bonds of captives, and keepest Thy faithfulness to those who sleep in the dust." What a tender and touch- ing expression — " they who sleep;" not departed, not dead, only sleep- ing in the watchful care of God! And now, rising to the highest conception which the finite creat- ure can form of the Infinite and Eternal, the worshiping soul can but repeat the solemn words which the prophet Isaiah reports to have heard in his first vision; the "Threefold-Holy of the angels worship- ing the divine presence: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole world is full of His glory !" What God is to the myriads of worlds encircling His throne, we know not; but in the heart of man longing for virtue, and to the mind searching for the light of truth. He is revealed as the Holy One, who loveth righteousness and leadeth man to holiness. Or, in the words of the Law : " Ye shall be lioly, for I, the Lord your God, am holy;" a strain modulated by a later Teacher — whom to-day, in this Parliament THE FUNCTION OF PRAYER ACCORDING TO JEWISH DOCTRINE. 75 of Religions, we are proud to call oue of Israel's noblest sons — in the words, " Btj ye perfect, even as your Father who is iu heaven is perfect." This is the purpose of all religion — this especially the object of Jewish worship — to lead man to holiness, to perfection. The function of prayer, therefore, is not to persuade God to granting us favors, or by our hymns and praises influence His will, but an opportunity for man to learn to subject his will to the will of God ; to strive after trutii ; to enrich his heart with love for humanity ; to ennoble the soul with the longing after righteousness. To the Jew the house of prayer is not a gate to heaven, not an instrument for gaining celestial rewards, but simply a gate to righteousness {Sliaare Zedek) through which he enters into the communion with the larger life of God. Holiness, or the obligation of virtue, the sacredness of duty, is the fifth element of Jew- ish worship, the indestructible foundation of Jewish morality. To some it may seem strange to find so little of the personal, or individual element in the Jewish service. Even in that prayer which by long usage has become associated with the idea of immortal- ity, in the Kaddish prayer, no reference to personal grief or personal reward is found. It contains nothing but the praise of God, the sanc- tification of His great name. But this fact again reveals only the lofty idealism of the Jewish mind. The consciousness that above all fleet- ing things God is ; that He is the only reality ; that His life is the life of all. This thought has sufficient cogency to uplift and console the heart of those sorrowing over the loss of their loved ones. This thought of God is also parent of another sentiment, the sen- timent of gratitude, forming an essential element of Jewish worship. I know of no more spiritual, noble and dignified thanks-offering than the one of the old Jewish service, known as the "Modim." What is the Jewish worshiper most thankful for? For the thought of God, for the knowledge of His works ! It may not be amiss even for Jewish ears to listen to this prayer once more. " We gratefully acknowledge, O Lord, our God, that Thou art our Creator and Preserver, the Ruck of our life, and the Shield of our help. From age to age we render thanks unto Thee for our lives, which are in Thy hands, for our souls intrusted to Thy care, for Thy marvelous works by which we are sur- rounded, and for Thy boundless goodness, which is revealed unto us at all times, morning, noon, and night. We bless Thee, All-Good, whose mercies never fail, whose loving-kindness is without; end. In Thee do we put our trust forever." To unite all men unto a band of brotherhood, and thus establish ■ peace on earth, is the aim of all religion. Feme, therefore, is the 76 THEOLOGY. chief blessing for which the Jew prays to his God. In no liturgy does the word peace occur so often as in the Jewish, or those patterned after it. He, the hero of a thousand battles, the warrior in the service of God, the martyr in the service of truth, the undaunted, uncompro- mising defender of liberty of conscience, has no sweeter melody, no more soul-stirring song, than when he prays to God for the blessing of peace. This prayer has found a place in the liturgies of church and mosque. The threefold benediction of tiie ancient Hebrew priest fore- shadowed humanity's prayer for universal peace. We need uo statistics to prove that the Jew is a loyal, law-abiding citizen of the nation whose social and political life he shares. He who breathes such a prayer for peace is certainly a lover of peace. They who were wont to decry the Jews as selfish, narrow, ex- clusive, should take the trouble of examining the Jewish prayer-book as to the sentiment of universality, of human brotherhood. In the prayers for New Year and Day of Atonement, the days when his soul is, most attuned to vibrate in response to noble sentiments, the Jew prays : " O God, let the fear of Thee extend over all Thy works, and reverence fov Tliee iill all creatures, that they may all form one band and do Thy will with an upright heart, so that all manner of wicked- ness shall cease, and all the dominion of the presumptuous shall be removed from the earth." Still more clearly is this idea of the brotherhood of all men ex- pressed in the grand concluding prayer of every service, the prayer known as " Alenu " or "Adoration." "It behooves us to render praise and thanksgiving unto the Creator of heaven and earth who has de- livered us from the darkness of error and sent to us the light of His truth. Therefore we hope that all superstition will speedily pass away, all wickedness cease, and the kingdom of God be established on earth ; then will the Lord be King over all the earth, on that day shall God be acknowledged One and His name be One." Again let me em- phasize that these prayers and hopes for the coming of the kingdom of God rehearse in theological terms the grand and ever-recurring theme of the one humanity built upon the rock of righteousness and ruled by truth and love. One more element of worship must be mentioned, as without it the circle of Jewish ideas would be incomplete, viz.: The idea of sin. To the Jew the thought of sin is no nletaphysical conception, but a personal experience; the consciousness of his own shortcomings burdens his soul, not the concern for the evil doings of some remote ancestor. The orthodox Jew feels his responsibility for the sins of his people, in the past as well as in the present; to thera he attributes his THE FUNCTION OF PRAYER ACCORDING TO JEWISH DOCTRINE. 77 national misfortunes. But these sins are not inherent in his nature; they are remediable. The time is near, he hopes, -wiien the measure of his suffering sliall be full, and when God will lead him back in glory to his own land. The modern, liberal Jew, who has discarded from his heart as well as his liturgy all longing for a national restora- tion, but considers his native or adopted land his Palestine, still feels the moral responsibility for the sins of all his brethren in faith, but this feeling does not carry with it the thought of divine punish- ment. According to Jewish -conception man is responsible only for his own sins ; forgiveness of sin can be obtained only by thorough re- pentance. The Jewish worshiper feels " there is no wall of separation between God and man." In him lives the consciousness of being a child of God. The Father will not reject the prayer of His children. This assurance of divine forgiveness explains the spirit of joyousness and cheerful trust that prevails tliroughout the Jewish service. Fdr this reason, too, the Jew reserves confession of sins and prayers for forgiveness for the great Day of Atonement. On that day he is bidden to examine his conduct, to make amends for his wrongdoing, to seek forgiveness of his offended brother, and thus he reconciled to himself and his God. The words of the concluding prayer of the Day of Atonement will express more clearly this sense of intimacy with God, which ani- mates the Jewish worshiper, than any lengthy exposition could do : " Thou reachest Thy hand unto him who is astray, and Thy right hand is outstretched to take up in love those who turn again unto Thee. Thou hast taught us, Lord, to acknowledge all our sins be- fore Thee, to the end that we may withhold our hands from unright- eousness. For Thou knowest, Lord, that we are but dust and ashes; therefore dost Thou forgive us much and often. But Thou hast chosen weak, fragile man from the beginning, and hast exalted him to know and reverence Thee. For who should dare say what Thou shalt do ? And were man yet righteous, what avails it to Thee ?. In Thy love also hast Thou given us this Day of Atonement, as a day of forgive- ness and pardon for all our sins, that we cease from all unrighteous- ness, turn again to Thee, and do Thy will with the whole heart. Have pity'upon us, therefore, in Thine infinite mercy, for Thou desirest not the destruction of the world, as it is written : Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near; let the wicked forsake his ways, and the unrighteous his thoughts, and let him re- turn unto the Lord who will have mercy upon him, and unto our God, for He will abundantly pardon." Yet in all these prayers and supplications no reference is found to 78 THEOLOGY. future punishment or reward; no dread of everlasting torment over- shadows the Jewish mind ; no selfish longing for eternal pleasures is an incentive to his repentance. These are, in brief, the elements of Jewish worship ; they give sufficient answer to the question : What is the purpose of prayer ac- cording to Jewish doctrines? It is to imbue the worshiper with the spirit of freedom and truth, with the love of God and of man ; with reverence for the past and trust for the future;, with the feeling of the sanctity of life and sacredness of duty; of gratitude and peace ; it is to inspire him with the larger thought than his own individuality, with the thought of the universal brotherhood of man and the all-embracing, all-pardoning love of God. These ideas of the Jewish liturgy are at the same time a truthful testimony to the char- acter of the Jewish people. MESSIANIC IDEA FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, ETC. 79 A REVIEW OF THE MESSIANIC IDEA FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY. BY DR. I. SCHWAB. The hope of the Messiah, that is, the hope of a restoration of dispersed Israel to a prosperous and glorious national independ- ence under their own king, is ancient. How far back in history it dates can, however, not be decided with certainty. Professor Fiirst, the erudite author of the "History of the Biblical Literature," traces it back to the early period of the division of the Israelitish empire, I after the death of King Solomon. This event, he maintains, had so seriously weakened the Hebrew government and country, and oc- casioned so many hostile onsets by neighboring nations, that the better part of the Israelites began already then to long for a restitution of the Davidic dynasty, which they expected to be after the pattern of the first. The ideal God-favored " branch " of the house of the beloved and renowned King David would, so the vision was, fill the present gap, and establish again a mighty, large, and unified empire. As eloquent exponents of that fervid longing for a reinstatement of the Davidic empire, Fiirst suggests, the Hebrew prophets, alike of the northern and southern kingdoms, came forward in their respective times. And that learned writer adds, that those very prophets raised the Messianic hope at the same time from its narrow scope to the expectation of the universal dominion both of Israel over other na- tions and of the religion of Jehovah over the false beliefs of the Gentiles. Fiirst is followed, to mention one more Jewish scholar, by Weiss, in his " History of the Traditions." He holds about the same po- sition. We do not here propose to enter upon a discussion of its merits. Let us state that we strongly incline to a divergent opin- ion. We prefer to coincide with the Jewish historian, Herzfeld, who very plausibly proposes that the manifold older Messianic predictions, some of which reach as far back as the ninth century B. C, lay dor- mant in the body of the transmitted Hebrew literature, and were not made use of for doctrinal objects or for sentimental vehicles of ex- pectation until the period of the Babylonian captivity. 80 THEOLOGY, Off. When at the commencement of the sixth century B. C. the de- portations of captive Judeans to tiie lands of the Babylonian cod- queror began, which ended with the total destruction of the State of Judah, comforting words and efforts of reassurance were needed for those unfortunates. At that epoch Jeremiah, the stanch and fore- sighted prophet, puts forth a course of eucouraging and cheering speeches, opeTSing out to the exiles brilliant perspectives of restora- tion. In the period of the exile fall also the comforting discour.ses of Ezekiel nnd Isaiah, the latter called by the critics the Great Unknown or Unnamed. All of these holy men aimed to arouse in the hearts of their downcast and distracted countrymen glowing expectations of a felicitous return to their native land. I The prophets, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, connected this prospective restitution of the exiles with the reappearance of a Davidie, that is. Messianic reign. Jeremiah pointed out a coming reign of a "branch of David," whom God will at his appointed time cause to grow up (xxiii, 5; xxxiii, 15). He even calls this future ruler of the line of David by the. specific name of David (xxx,9). Likewise does Ezekiel designate in his predictions the future " king and shepherd of Israel" as Jehovah's " servant, David " (xxxiv, 24 ; xxxvii, 24). This deno- tation of David proper for the promised king of Israel, was most probably not intended to be construed literally. At any rate it was commonly in the time of Jesus, as well as among the later rabbis of the Talmud, conceived to refer to none other than a descendant of David. The Messiah to come was in popular parlance styled the " son of David." This title was already well and firmly established in the New Testament times, as appears unquestionably from the Gospels. If we inquire, further, how have Jeremiah and Ezekiel as well as some older prophets pictured in' their own minds the nature and form of the government of the ideal Davidie king — Christ — the answer will be, that they conceived it to be theocratic, after the pattern of the reign of King David of old. The Messiah was to be, like David, God's viceregent or viceroy, carrying forward, on behalf of the Al- mighty Sovereign, an administration of "judgment and justice." There are many evidences from Scripture corroborating our as- sumption that the ideal Messianic king was held eminently vicarious- of Jehovah. It may be reluctant to our advanced sentiment to admit that the Davidie kingship, alike past and to come, should have been extolled so egregiously. But the fact nevertheless remains that the- flebrews of the pre-exilian and exilian times were as susceptible of exalting kings as were other nationalities. One need only compare- MESSIANIC IDEA FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, ETC. 81 Pss. ii, and ex, 1, to be convinced of the accuracy of our assertion. As to the ideal Messiauic king it is no less true that his government was prophetically conceived to mergS into that of Jehovah and become in every sense and bearing, except that of religious worship, identical with it. It is tills consideration that accounts for the easy interchange, in many Jewish writings of old, of the phrase "Kingdom of God" with "Kingdom of the House of David" — the latter in the view of Messiahdom. That interchange made the phrase " Kingdom of God " or "of Heaven," in its relation to the Messiah, very popular in course of time. So familiar was, indeed, in the subsequent era of the Roman dominion in which the hope of Messiah had to be cautiously veiled, the expression Kingdom of God to every Israelite, that, when John the Baptist and Jesus heralded iis near approach, every Jewish hearer readily understood it in the Messianic meaning, which both previous custom and present political fear had put and fixed upon it. All this can be explained to be originally due to that Hebrew concept of an- terior times, a concept merging the divine government and that of his temporal viceregeut into one another. After this diversion we have to pass over to the before-mentioned third prophet of the exile, Isaiah II. A more enthusiastic prophet \ Israel never had. His zeal for the cause of his captive brethren ex- ceeded all measure. In the airy sweeps of his lofty imagination, he sought to set up the waning confidence and flagging courage of his brethren of the captivity. He became in reality the prophet of con- solation proper. At last, after about fifty years from the destruction of the State of Judah, the hour of restoration struck for the wretched exiles. When Cyrus approached Babylon with his gigantic array of sturdy Persians, our fiery prophet, overcharged as he was with pious patriot- ism, proclaimed that eastern conqueror as Jehovah's gentle "shepherd and liberating Messiah" (ib. xliv, 28; xlv, 11), wlio would dismiss the exiles to their former homes and rebuild Jerusalem (ib. xiii). He makes no mention whatever, though, of a Hebrew Davidic king beiutr in any way instrumental in -the act of restoration. Cyrus was to him evidently a good enough organ of salvation for Israel. He was in his eyes fully qualified to act the part of Christ-emancipator. What mattered it, in very fact, whom Jehovah would appoint as national savior and redeemer. All that Israel craved for in the desert of the exile was reinstatement into their inheritance. This granted and about to be accomplished, the rest of previous Davidic predictions could fairly be waived or at any rate held in abeyance as to tb.eir dog- 6 82 THEOLOGY. matic force. Moreover, our prophet was, to judge from his various compositions, more eugrossed by the religious than the political feat- ure of Israel's restoration. His Aief concern was, that it should be attended with the stamping out of idolatry from Israel and the abolition of false worship in general, as well as the universal recogni- tion of the Unity of God. (See xlii, 6; xlv, 6; Ivi, 3, 6.) If now we come to consider whether the many encouraging and uplifting predictions of the prominent prophets of the exile became true, we will find that they were only partially realized. It can be proven A\ithout any difficulty that ail of them fell considerably short of the wide range those inspired men had given them. Were the hopeful anticipations uttered iu, and aroused by, their writings for this reason vain and futile? Not at all. They served their purpose at the time. They rekindled the dispirited hearts of the people of the captivity, held them together iu a bond of uniou, and guarded them from losing their identity in their scattered condition among the heathens. Were these not objects well worthy of the highest efii)rts -of spirited eloquence ? Will we find fault with them for depicting the future in too bright, even dazzling, hues, and thus awakening too high- flown expectations in the minds of the exiled brethren ? No, our his- torically sympathetic hearts are too indulgent for that. Moreover, it has to be borne iu mind that those prophets were inspired idealists. They would figure less ou the natural evolution from the complexities of the stern and sad preseut thau ou a supernatural flashiug out of- divine help for their people. In their idealism they would leave out of the accouut the practical consideration — to use a phrase of a mod- ern writer — that " liberty is a matter for the statesman to define rather than the poet to invoke." Persian statesmanship was, as eveuts proved, not willing, despite scores of Hebrew oracles to the contrary, to surrender the dominion over its Jewish subjects into their own hands. Was it not favor enough that Cyrus gave the exiles permis- sion to return? This message of emaucipation was, indeed, received by them with jubilant applause. Their sore-tried hearts broke forth in high strains of rejoicing. Yet, alas ! the sudden exultation was soon toned down again by many adverse eveuts. All their high hopes of national bliss were blighted by stubborn untoward reality. We can not here venture to describe even briefly the ccmdition of the returned colony in the Jewish laud in the two centuries of the Persian period. ,0u the whole, it has to be said that it was almost in- variably precarious, depressed, and dismal. Their hoped-for greatness proved an abortive dream; their farjcied glory a delusive mirage. Their material lot became hard in many ways while under Persia. MESSIANIC IDEA FRPM THE EARLIEST TIMES, ETC. 83 Bill what grieved and vexed them most was the very condition of for- eign servitude itself. The hearts of the Jews in the new settlement were never at ease in view of their tributary dependence on foreign, heathen. powers. (See Neh. iv, 36. 37; Ezra ix, 8. 9.) To be such tributaries mortified them to the core. In their strong feeling of themselves as a nation and one with a God-given, hereditary territory, they were continually irritated at a state of such dependence. They could not but regard it as actual slavery. And slavery it essentially was. They would bear it submissively, though, as long as it wasnot too oppressive and degrading. But as a reproacli and disgrace it nevertheless appeared to them .at all times. For a redemption from that dependence they craved and prayed with devout hearts. This national consummation was, as they expected, to be reached through the arrival of its central personage — the God-appointed King — Messiah. A vague notion of the realization of the Messianic hope in the per- son of their leader, Zerubbabel, may indeed have struck the returned congregation of exiles. This grandee who headed the caravan of liber- ated Jews on the return march toward the loved Jerusalem, was really descended from David. Yet how grievous must have been the subse- quent disillusion, had they really indulged such a notion. For they soon found out that their governor was -not even powerful enough to carry on and complete the building of the Temple. It remained un- finished for twenty years. So little was Zeriibbabel subsequently re- 1 gar.ded as the Messiah, that the prophet Zechariah had to predict another " branch" (iii, 8 ; comp. Jer. xxxiii, 15) for accomplishing the work. Far from being an independent Jewish sovereign, Zerubbabel was no more than a commissioned functionary of the Persian crown. His political dignity consisted mainly, we suppose, in being the responsible revenue deliverer to the satraps of Persia. Nor was the office of Jewish governor hereditary in his family. There may, indeed, have existed in Judea during the second State a line of titular princes whose descent was from David. But if there were such distinguished personages, we are confident that they were not invested with any political authority. Furthermore, it is historically certain that the incumbents of the chief magistracy of the Jewish nation during the second Commonwealth were, at all events from the Greek period forward, the high priests, and not any secular princes. Josephus knows of no other lieads of the uation than the high priests, even from the beginning of the second State. But even these high priests, we contend on well-based research (against Schuerer and Wellhausen), were not independent rulers. It was the national 84 THEOLOGY. council, the Saiiliedriii, which the Jewish people regarded as their only rightful supreme authority. The high priests derived their title from that representative national body. Whatever autonomy the for- eign masters left to the nation was vested in the Sanhedrin. From this supreme council emanated all the power and prerogatives enjoyed by the high priests. For the new state was in approxiaiate accommo- dation to the theory of Mosaism, a democratic theocracy. Accord- ingly, it was the senate alone that held the national judicature. The high priest had no judicial competence of his own. All the prestige by which he excelled the other senators was, that he passed for the diplomatic and fiscal representative of the people before the foreign governments to which the Jewish nation was subject. Passing now from the Persian to the Greek period, we have to say tliat when Alexander of Macedon made himself " master of all Asia," the Jews of Palestine submitted voluntarily to him. They hailed this European conqueror with genuine, hearty confidence. In it they were not disappointed. The two centuries of dreary and hope- less national life under the Persian reign were with the new Mace- donian epoch succeeded by a comparatively long term of peace and fair and intelligent dealing on the part of the Greek rulers. The favors which Alexander showed to the Jews generally, and the privi- leges he accorded to those of Alexandria, are known from history. The rule of the Ptolemies over Palestine after the division of Alexander's empire was, on the whole, mild and pacific. The Jews bore their tributary relations to them very probably without murmur. They always acquiesced submissively in this dependent condition under judicious and humane government. That the traditional Messianic expectation was during those earlier centuries of Greek dominion as much alive as before can not be doubted. But there were, we judge, few, if any, occasions for any sudden stir and excitement of the national feeling toward an inde- pendent Messianic government. The Palestinian Jews may have suffered periodically from the wars carried on between Egypt and Syria since the death of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Yet they bore this fate patiently as long as their sacred rights were not invaded, their honor not assailed, and no violent attempts made upon the security of their lives and interests. That their Messianic hope will have in that century, as ever before and afterward, varied in degree of fervor ac- cording to the complexion of the times, may be taken for granted. The logical postulate that what lives at.an earlier and exists still at a later point of time can not have died out in the meautime, holds good with the Messianic hope as with all other objects. But aside from MESSIANIC IDEA FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, ETC. 85 this unfailing truism we can bring positive proof that tliere never was any cessation of tlie hope of the Messiah through the entire length of the second Jewish State. Our information comes from the ancient liturgy. By turning these early compositions to account, we will find that much as the historical records have left us in the dark as to the question of tiie later pre-Christian Messianic expectations, there is at least one source which, if properly viewed, diffuses suificient light upon it. This source is the original type of daily service handed down to us from the earliest days of the reorganized Judean com- munity. A detailed consideration of the old liturgical passages bearing on Messianism is precluded on this occasion. Briefly we will say in this place that our oldest forms of the prayer have as their substantial keynote Israel's national hope of salvation. Tiiose forms we hold to. date essentially back, not only to the Men of the Great Assembly, but to the sages of the earlier national councils. Those wise representa- tive men — Scribes as they are called — will have composed, soon after the completion of the Temple, suitable types of service for public and private occasions. The year 500 B. C. may have already witnessed the institution of that liturgy which has come down to us with the stamp of antiquity. We invite students of our liturgy to cast a glance at the two benedictions preceding and the one following the Shema- chapters. The two former have significant Messianic clauses, the last is exclusively Messianic. We call their attention further to the tra- ditional eighteen forms of dail}'' prayer. Upon close research they will discover that the theme of the present forms 1, 2, 7, 10, II, 14, 15, and 17 is cither entirely or partly Me-ssianic. Even one of the three extant formulas of the third benediction, the Kedushah, has'a Messianic reference. It may perhaps be inexact to apply the epithet Messianic to the contents of all those prayers just noticed. We know that it is more correct to say that their theme is that of "salvation." Tlie word sal- vation comprehends more aptly the various points into wliich the hope of national-religious restoration is divided. But as custom has at- tached to such restoration the general term Messianic, we too may use it here indiscriminately as to the various relations of Israel's latter-day expectation. Let us, in addition to the foregoing specimens, mention, yet, two out of the four benedictions of the traditional Thanksgiving Prayer after meals. That the original character of this prayer has not been altered in its run through successive ages, we may assume with some degree of certainty. It is safe to say that all the Jewish stock prayers 86 THEOLOGY. dating back to the ages of the Men of the Great Assembly remained, in regard to type and even order, the same during the whole Persian, Grecian, Maccabean, Herodian, and Roman periods. Those two thanksgiving benedictions are, as will be borne out by an examination of their tenor. Messianic, too. Even our popular Kaddish prayer was originally meant to be no other than an invocation of God to let his Kingdom, the Messianic, come speedily. Our ancient liturgy offers us then, as can be clearly seen, a direct and eminent illustration of the Jewish thought and feeling concerning Messianism or national futurity, as maintained for the four hundred years preceding the Syro- Greek rule over the Jewish land. History has, accordingly, not been so envions as to foreclose for us a tolerably clear view of Israel's national hopes during that long stretch of time. It has in any case not withheld from us the oppor- tunity of making out, by tlie way of close investigation, the attitude which the patriotic and pious Jews of those ages held toward the inherited Messianic expectation. We have from our transmitted an- cient liturgy abundant evidence to prove that this expectation was incessantly alive during the whole existence of the second State. We learn to satisfaction that what the prophets had foretold as to the re- instatement of Israel to their own land, government, and sanctuary, was not inanimately imbedded in obscure minds of literature, or only silently embodied in the spiritual songs of sacred bards, but made up an integrant, solid, and living part of their soul's innermost hopes and aspirations. We have now to pass to a brief review of the Syro-Greek do- miniou, from about the beginning of the second century B. C With the entrance of Antiochus the Great on the scene, the Jewish affairs took a decided turn for the worse. The fierce persecution of the Jews by his sou, Antiochus Epiphanes, is amply known to readers of his- tory. Despair had in those days seized upon the faithful when they were by that mad tyrant forced to abjure, for the first time in their national existence, the God of their fathers, and embrace the pagan worship, a worship which was in their eyes "an abominatiou of desolation." The Maccabee uprising and struggles to avenge those unheard-of Syrian attempts of profanation of their sacred institutions and all the atrocities committed against their nation by Antiochus, his menials, and his army, are set forth in the annals of history. In those troublous days the cry for speedy delivery, the*prayer for the ar- rival of Messiah, the son of David, will have gone up from the heav- ing breasts of thousands of the pious Jews. How long that dire fatality would hang over the nation, no one could tell. There was MESSIANIC IDEA FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, ETC. 87 I no prophet who could forebode the future. Prophecy was then be- ll lieved to be extinct. Yet there was a would-be prophet who carae forward to make known the end of the natioual sorrows. His assumed name was Daniel. His book, which made a powerful impression upou the mystically inclined of all after times, contains, among other mat- ter, four prophetical visions (in chapters vii-xii). All of these alleged oracles aim to point out, as modern criticism has established, the early I downfall of the fanatical tyrant, Antiochus Epiphaues. This down- fall would, the seer advances, be accomplished miraculously by the God of Heaven, Israel's God. The pi'opliet tells us that he was trans- lated to Heaven where God held court with his angels, pronouncing the sentence of destruction upon the arrogant beast. But this aveng- ing doom alone was not sufficient to our visiouary. He felt himself called upon to offer yet greater consolation to his hearers or readers. n In a nightly vision he " beholds one like the son of man coming with ' the clouds of heaven. . . . And there was given him dominion and glory, and a kingdom that all people, nations, and languages should serve him ; his dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away." This apparition, the subject of which is a nebulous quasi-son of man, had an astounding effect upon the minds of Messianic believers during that second century. Tiie author of the apocryphal book of Enoch has copied and adopted for his spiritualistic Messiah that very title " son of man," leaving out, however, the particle of comparison, "like." He uses it alternately with the name "son of God" for the same supernal personage of his. Likewise has Jesus, as the gospels show, called himself, in his capacity of Messiah, by the name "son of man," and that much more frequently and seemingly in preference to the other title "son of God." Nay he emphasized his real Messianic claim under the form of that Danielle vision. His reapperance about the end of this world to perfect his Messianic Kingdom which he declared to be accomplished at an early date, Jesus repeatedly enunciated to be in or with the clouds of heaven. In that incontestably authentic gospel account, that of his trial before the high priest, in whicli he avows himself " the Messiah, the son of God," he further asserts of himself, "hereafter shall ye see the son of man 'sitting im the right hand of power (God) and coming in the clouds of heaven." The stupendous influence px- i ercised by that Dainielic image is clearly recognized from this and kin- dred circumstances. There are critics, let ns remark, who insist that the author of Daniel never thought of foreshadowing a personal deliverer and ruler 88 THEOLOGY. fo come. They argue from the sequel of the description of that vision, that the " kingdom " was not really promised to one man, but to the people of the holy ones in heaven, that is, to the saints in Israel whose guardians the angels in lieaven are. Ambiguous enough that Danielle vision is iu very truth. Yet in spite of all this ambiguity, were the great majority of past and present expositors not frightened from accepting that relation as typifying a Messianic one-man rule. To return once more to our would-be prophet. By the way of mystical calculations, he brings out the revelation that the stereotyped seventy years which Jeremiah had set down as the term of the desola- tion of Jerusalem, mean not years, but weeks of years, tiiat is, seven times seventy years. By this prodigious stretcli, the extent of Israel's entire national suffering could be approximately brought down to Daniel's own, really the Maccabean, time. The end of that suffering he predicts in a sort of veiled oracle. The sum and substance of it no doubt was, that with the death of the hated persecutor, Aniiochus, a real glorious and golden era would be ushered in for tlie faitiiful of Israel. They would receive the govern- ment from the God of heaven and possess it forever more. Now let us ask, was tliis prediction fulfilled? Did the anticipated salvation come lo pass? Was independent government, with or without a king — Messiah— vouchsafed to Israel after the death of Antiochus, the terminus laid down by Daniel for the cessation of Israel's misfortune? By no means. Judas Maccabeus accomplished, indeed, the reparation of Israel's religious institutii/ns. He vindicated most successfully, togetiier with the holy warriors who followed him, the honor of his country and the purity of the ancestral religion. But political independence from Syria he did not achieve. From 161 B. C. on, when Jonathan, his brother, had succeeded him, a sort of free government with fair political privileges was estab- lished. His brother Simon secured, nineteen years later, even total political independence from Syria. But it was not of long duration. Judea became afterward again tributary to Syria. From tbis condi- tion it was not ultimately freed till about the year 128 B. C, under John Hyrcanus. What were the Messianic expectations of the Jews since the growth of the Maccabee dominion? Scarcely can it be supposed that the cry for a Messiah burst forth with loud accents while the Maccabee prince, Simon, ruled over the country. The nation, recognizing his merits, chose him in a collective assembly " high priest and chief for- MESSIANIC IDEA PROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, ETC. 89 ever until a prophet would rise" (who might, namely, give, in the name of God, different directions about the government). The latter clause suggests to ns that that Jewish assembly were diffident in their minds as to their liberty in designating popular rulers without a direct divine authority. Prevalent, we presume, was in their thoughts the possibility of a sudden, authoritative proclamation, through an accredited oracle, that the ideal king of the line of David was coming to take charge of the divine government — the theocracy of the Jewish nation. Provisionally, however, it is reasonable to believe that the Jewish people were then content with the prevailing order of things. If, further, it be true what the author of the first book of Maccabees avers, that in those days " every man was sitting under his vine, and under his fig-tree," we can not for one moment suppose that, under such realizations of Messianic bliss, there should have existed an im- pulsive yearning toward another ruler, the imagined Messiah of the family of David. A tone of calm religious waiting for him will have, we allow, even then pervaded the souls of the pious. But that it should have had the character of an impatient longing, wo can not consistently with reason presume. The set prayers for national restoration were doubtless continued to be offered then as before, in public as in private. The hopes of Israel's futurity, once cast in a fixed mold by the venerated Scribes, enjoyed a popular respect and awe which consecrated them into invio- lable canons. Devotional formularies, sanctioned by anterior author- ity and age, obtained always a strong, tenacious hold over orthodox people, however meaningless and soulless they may have become .through the change and progress of the times. Bat for all that, it is impossible for us to believe that there was any particular pathetic force to the prayers for restoration recited in the days of the Mnccabee ruler, Simon. The same may be said of the prosperous reign of his sou, John Hyrcanus, B. C. 135-105. Under him almost a Davidic splendor, greatness, and power prevailed. By the side of proud national self- consciousness the morbid sigh for an unknown and unknowable royal personage who should yet improve upou the present common happi- ness, can not well be imagined to have burst forth. The Messianic vision, it must be admitted by all, was originally born of gloom. It was always expressed, witli more or less demon- strative force, under somber aspects .of the times. Its "reason of existence" was either the dreary night of oppression or the dim twi- light of a dubious destiny. In the serene radiance of the light of free- 90 THEOLOGY. dom and peace, or the lucid gleam of temporal bliss, however, the motive for its being is only hypothetical. If it nevertheless exists under such favorable conditions, it is due to a mere emotional attach- ment to the past and a pious repugnance to part from the wonted track cut by venerated ancestors and trodden all along in subsequent ages. That, therefore, the Jews were under the prosperous reign of the high-priestly prince, John Hyroanus, little troubled about the Mes- sianic future, may be set down as a reasonable conclusion. Yet, while all this seems natural in the common point of view, and even obvious from a general glance at the outward aspect of the Jewish affairs of that time, we must not conceal a counter-view inev- itably thrust upon us in the present consideration. This contrary impression results from the fact that a serious and far-reaching religious disturbance entered the Jewish life at some junct- ure of that prince's reign. It was when he deserted orthodox Phari- saic Judaism and joined the Sadducean party. That the Sadducees were, for their rejection of the traditions, the disavowal of resurrec- tion, and a latitudinarian mode of religious life generally, regarded by the Pharisaic votaries and the people at large who adhered to them as their teachers and guides, as heterodox, later even as heretics, is no- torious. From the time, therefore, that John Hyrcanus introduced Sadduceeism and raised it to the throne, till Pompey made an end to the domestic Asmonean government, there must have sprung up ' among the orthodox masses a decided discontent with that ruler and a strong revulsion of their innermost sentiments, which interfered se- riously with their feeling of happiness, otherwise secured by the strength and success of his reign. But it was not only Sadduceeism on the throne that aggravated- the pious sensibilities of the people. There came to it yet the bold at- tempt of absolute monarchy, of kingship symbolized by the diadem. Hyrcanus's son, Aristobulus I., was the first Asmonean prince who put on the regal diadem. This was to the Jewish people of those latter days — so vast a transformation had been wrought upon their minds in the post-exilian period — an odious emblem of irresponsible absolutism. Against such domination of mastering rulers their hearts rebelled. They even denounced it openly as irreconcilable with their national destiny. We meet in Josephus with two accounts of such open depre- cations of formal kingship by the representatives of the nation ; the one in Pompey's time, which was directly aimed at the Asmonean prince, Aristobulus 11., and the other about sixty years later, after the death of Herod. That the feverish nation broke forth into vigorous MESSIANIC IDEA FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, ETC. 91 demonstrations against crowned royalty on both those occasions is very suggestive to us. What we venture to derive from those marked expressions of sorely agitated national sentiments is, that the cry for the "Kingdom of God " is associable with, and dates back to, the early days of de- tested Sadducean-Asmonean rule, if not already to the earlier period of the Maccabee struggles. "We mean to say, that that phrase, old- established as it was in its affirmative, theocratic and theological bear- ing, came prominently forward in an additional negative sense as early at least as the hated ruling Sadduceeisni usurped the insignia of over- powering tyranny, especially its most repulsive sign, the royal diadem. As a true and devout exponent of those combined meanings at- tached to the expression, " Kingdom of God," appears to us the author of the apocryphal Psalms of Solomon. These compositions were, in our opinion, written by the son of a Pharisaic fugitive from the fury of Alexander Janneus, about the middle of the first century B. C. At the time of his writing, there had already passed over the na- tion the twenty-seven years of the rule and atrocious misgovernment of that most corrupt Asmonean prince. Also the fierce contention be- tween his two .sons had already brought on the armed arbitration by Pompey, who subdued the Jewish land into tribute to Kome. The lamentable havoc made by this triumphant conqueror at the capture of Jerusalem, as well as the great suffering and near partial exile at- tendant upon the later invasion of Cassius, were fresh in the memory of our psalmodist. Open the book of his Psalter and read. You will meet most touching Messianic outcries and invocations. The ring of his Mes- sianic sighs is as forcible as it is melancholy. We can nothere enter upon a particular estimation of that most iuvaluable collection — invaluable the more because it is the only Jewish literary product of the later pre-Christian ages which treats of the Messiah in a common-sense style and does not wrap up its expectations in unintelligible hinis or entangle us in a labyrinth of impossible imagery and confusing ciphers. Summarily let us observe that its author betrays at once an in- vincible loathing and rankling hatred for the degenerated and impious Asmonean dynasty, and a strong, patriotic, religious antipathy against the newly established foreign supremacy, the Roman. As an unholy power, for its image worship, moral corruptioti, and brutality, the world-conquering Rome was already theu viewed by the serious- minded sous of Israel. A relief from the state of misery and degradation into which the nation had fallen at tlie time of our psalmodist; he could expect but 92 THEOLOGY. from God. Him he implores, indeed, as the only savior of Israel, to let His mercy soon appear over them and to send as ruler his own Messiah, the son of David, thus verifying His ancient oath that the kingdom should not part from the house of David forever. Did his tuneful and patiietic strains, let us inquire, meet with Providential response? Did the anticipated Messiah come? No. There was even a worse fate in store for the Jewish nation than the one our poet had witnessed and reflected on. It was the crushing and insupportable misrule of the Idumean usurper, Herod, which lasted for forty long and weary years. Herod " filled the country with poverty and iniquity and inflicted moi-e sufier- ing on the nation during his reign than they had sustained through all the five centuries previous " — this was the bitter complaint which a Jewish senatorial deputation brought before the Emperor Augustus in the year 4 B. C, after that blood-thirsty monster had passed from the living. It was on this occasion, too, that these Jewish representatives begged that their nation should have no more kings. Their official protestation against kingship was, as we suggested above, the negative side of Israel's constant watchword, tlie " Kingdom of Heaven," Tiiey pleaded further "for liberty to live by their own laws,'' avowing in all otlier respects profound loyally to the imperial sovereign. They asked that their land be joined to the Syrian province, rather than be held longer under the thraldom of a domestic tyrant lilie Archelaus. It was in this very year, too, and in the absence of that delega- tion, that a violent revolt broke out in the Jewish land. The popular uprising took its start on the Peutecost feast iu Jerusalem. The whole nation from one border of the- country b> another, seemed to have been seized by an instantaneous impulse to make a bold strike for liberty. The insurrection spread all over Judea, Galilee, Perea, and Idumea. The inflamed and infuriated masses who besieged the for- tress of Jerusalem had to deal with the pitiless and rapacious pro- curator of Syrfa, Sabinus. They were even, for all that we can learn to the contrary, witliout any commander. During those convulsions which shook the Jewish land to its center, there occurred a characteristic insurrectionist movement which deserves special notice iu this place. Josephus tells us that the insur- gents of Galilee had as leader, Judas ; those of Perea, Simon ; and those of the valley of Judea, north-west of Jerusalem, a shepherd named Athrouges. The last two leaders he lets put on kingly diadems. Of Judas MESSIANIC IDEA FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, ETC. 93 of Galilae he only says that he had the "ambitious desire of the royal dignity." Kings were, he informs us, moreover, created ou all sides. We are of opinion that those kingly agitators were Messianic pre- tenders. As would-be Messiahs they have possibly succeeded in drawing I mobs after them by miracles of liberation. For all those "false' prophets" whom Josephus introduces here and there as pretending lib- erators of the nation in the Roman times, were such as claimed "di- vine inspiration," finding credit with the vulgar by performing first some "signals of liberty" and setting out afterward on their martial deeds of deliverance. We venture to believe that the kingly pretenders in question were of about the same type aa those " false prophets." Scarcely, we think, could those adventurers have succeeded in attracting mobs for their designs, had they not joined with their presumptuous boast of kingship the transcendent claim of supernatural endowment for their alleged office of liberation. This presumed call from Heaven they would doubtless manifest by performing some magical feats. It is needless to inquire into the condition of mind of those agi- tators. In excited days, impulsive men with an adventurous spirit rarely fail in finding a following. An ignorant and easily seducible rabble can be mustered almost in the twinkling of an eye. To win their confidence by some luring methods of imposture is an easy mat- ter. The crafty and fanatical leaders know how to improve upon their susceptibilities and use them for their selfish or vain-glorious schemes. In pursuing them, the designing deluders affect greater and greater su- periority over their dupes, till at last they become themselves, many of them, a prey to the frenzy of indomitable egoism, to the point even of believing themselves in the paroxysm of their conceit, extraor- dinary beings, gifted with powers inapproachable to all the rest. That an overwrought egoism possessed also the minds of those kingly agi- tators, whether they passed themselves off" for Messiahs or not, is not to be questioned. Their movement, we have to add, was unsuccessful. The whole revolt was indeed soon quelled. Varus's mighty forces had little difficulty in crushing the revolting multitudes who had attempted to shake off the Idumean yoke. Before concluding we have yet to mention another, much more important and momentous pre-Christian movement. It is that of the same Judas of Galilee who raised an insurrection after Judea had been incorporated into the Roman empire as a province and annexed to Svria, in the year 6 A. D. With this act, the political autonomy of the 94 THEOLOGY. Jewish State came, strictly considered, to an end, to be restored no more while Rome held its sway over it. A year after that annexation, the Roman authorities introduced a system of direct assessment on the property and persons of the Judeans. It bore the Latin name census. This census enacted by Quirinius called forth a violent irritation and resistance on the part of the entire Jewish people. They held it an "awful thing" to have to obey the foreign dictation of enrollment for taxation. It was not so much the unheard-of direct taxes levied from individual inhabitants, or the chafing burden of the new taxation imposed on them, as the coer- cion into the despotic will of the Roman masters, that made the census so repulsive to them and aggravated their resentment to the highest pitch. Yet the excited multitude was soon prevailed upon to calm down and subside into the inevitable with loyal subordination. There were, however, enough Jewish people, and those mainly of the younger class, who would not consent to endure the new harsh en- actment without a forcible attempt at redress. They were those who held, to use an expression of Lecky's, "non-resistance incompatible with political liberty." They found a ready leader in the person of the heroic Judas of Galilee, the same who had previously acted as head of the Galilean revolters. This time Judas came forward as the champion of all the insur- gents of the land, to lead them forth to victory or death b}' open and deilant armed resistance. Did he set up for a Messiah at this juncture ? From a relation in the Acts of the Apostles (v, 37), it would almost seem, by implication at least, that the present venture was of a Messianic sort. But for us it is impossible to form such an idea of that gallant Gaulonite. His memorable watch-word, "God is the only Ruler and Lord," by which he threw the gauntlet at every form of human despotism, pre- cludes positively auy royal and, consequently, Messianic aspiration having taken hold of his mind. That declaration was a bold manifesto thrust out against any foreign restraint, no less than against domestic tyranny. Different from the Pharisaic rabbis and'fthe larger body of the common people who waited idly, though eagerly, for a miraculous manifestation of the Kingdom of God, which would bring to an end forever all native and foreign tyrannical sovereignty alike, the ad- herents of Judas concluded to be their own Messiahs, and help for- ward the independent self-government of the nation, under God, in accordance with the Mosaic constitution. Did those zealotic Independents, then, not cherish the hope of a MESSIANIC IDEA FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES, ETC. 95 coming personal Messiah at all? We can not tell. What we know frona the invidious Jewish historian, Josephus, himself is, that they had "an inviolable attachment to liberty." For it they would, in- deed, hazard life, substance, and all. For it they would buckle on their armor and enter into a desperate struggle with the Roman colossus, fully aware, as they must have been, that they could be no match for it. Their revolutionary attempt was the noblest contest for liberty and God ever undertaken by any body of men. It was at once an assertion of the cause of the people against human autocrats, and of God, the King of king, agaiilst what Thomas Paiue has styled the " little paltry dignity of earthly kings." It was further in its high aims and principles, in many respects at least, the antetype of the American republican independence. It differed from it only in this respect, that Judas's movement was in- effective, issuing in disaster then and ending, in the later revolution which it had spiritually and organically engendered, in tiie ruin of the whole Jewish State. But the American war of independence led to a signal conquest over tyranny and the brilliant achieveriient of liberty. The one failed of bringing on the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, the dominion of pure religion, law, and justice administered by the people's own representatives, without interference by domestic or for- eign potentates. The other brought in its train the reign of the JMessiah — the union of the American republic upon the foundation of freedom and equality. Under the guidance of this Messiah, impersonal, yet all-sufficient for the happiness of men, the American nation has since that memorable struggle for independence continued to proclaim to the whole world the " everlasting creed of liberty." Of this nation we, the Jews, feel proud to be members. To it we are bound by the sacred ties of love of country and unshaken de- votion. In this " promised land that flows with Freedom's honey and milk," we have our safe "refuge, feeling ourselves exiles no more, nor yearning in the least degree toward a repatriation to the land of Israel of old. In it we will continually strive, in common with all the other citizens of different extractions and creeds, to enhance its welfare and help forwarding all peaceful arts, higher culture, generous, mutual sentiments, and true religion. ETHICS. THE ETHICS OF JUDAISM. By EABBI I. M-. WISE. What Aristotle called Ethics, Cicero called Morals. The two terms are synonymous also Avith Moral Philosophy, in re, different in method only. Any one of these three terms designates the science of man's free will, motives, volitions and actions, rights and duties, in his relations to man and accountability toward God. Man's duties to God, being of a religious nature, belong properly to Theology. The principle of ethics is in human nature. Every self-conscious human being feels and knows that the Good and the Right, the True and the Beautiful, are desirable and ought to be choseu, and the nega- tives thereof are objectionable and ought to be shunned. We call this conscience, an innate and unconscious judgment, which distin- guishes man as such. The Moral Law, the Categoric Imperative, mustnecessarily be in man. No moral laws, no ethics of any kind, could possibly be evolved or developed in the human race if the moral capacity was not there originally. Evolution or Development signifies the production of a succession of facts, phenomena, or things similar to their fundamental element. None can evolve gold from iron or rocks from clouds. Experience and edu- cation can only develop that which is elemental in man ; it can but evolve qualities from capacities, and render them constant in conscious- ness and character. So the unconscious and innate conscience may evolve virtue, which is the flower of the plant. What is good and right ? What is true and beautiful ? These are problems of quiddity which experience and judgment define, and have defined differently in different generations, nations, climates, natural or artificial environs which differently affected the experience and judgment of the original reasoner, who established in any particu- lar case this or that definition of the good and right, the true and beautiful. The difference between Ethics and Esthetics is formal only.- Therefore, the Moral Law is one in the whole family of man, the moral laws are multifarious, not seldom contradictory, unstable, and (99) 100 ETHICS. unjust. Slave holding nations consider slavery perfectly moral ; we do not. Despotism is considered moral in despotic countries ; we con- sider it immoral. Slaying dumb animals is a moral sport to habitual hunters, and a barbarous crime to seusible people, who would punish their boys for destroying a bird's nest or maltreating a cat. It is right to slay many innocent men on the battle-field of contesting nations and a capital crime to slay one. Every act which the Decalogue pro- hibits was considered just and right somewhere and at some time, and it is partly the case to-day, even outside of the homes of the savages and semi-barbariaus. Auto dafes, torture, and pyre applied to punish heretics, was for many centuries considered right, perfectly moral; ostracizing, persecuting, and expatriating persons under the same plea, is considered right and moral in certain regions of civilized society ; and we condemn both practices as unjust and immoral. It is evident, therefore, that history offers no fixed code of moral laws, and can produce no canon and guide to all, either by speculation or evolution. Tiie conscientious individual could be guided only by the maxim of his own judgment, viz., that which I to the best of my knowledge consider to be right, good, and true, is moral to do, and the negative thereof is moral to shun. No man can be better than he knows how to be. But it is insufficient in two directions: 1. No man can stand still to consider at every problem in practical life, whether to do or not to do is moral to the best of his knowledge. 2. Any deed, action, or volition, to be moral, must also be beueficia], or at least not injurious to society, of which every person is a mere in- dividual. That only is good which is good for all the good, only that is right which is right to all the righteous, as only that is true ■which is true universally. No man can stand still to consider at every problem in practical life, whether to do or not to do so is beneficial or injurious to society ; few possess the ability so to do. Therefore, philosophers like Baruch Spinoza and his numerous followers, denying moral freedom to man, advanced the moral maxim of authority. They maintain it is moral to do or to shun that which the existing authority, the highest power, commands or forbids to be done or shunned. Obedience is the highest virtue ; it is Stoic sub- mission to the inevitable. If such submission is sinful according to the inherent Moral Law, the individual is not accountable for it; it is the sin of that authority or that highest power. . This maxim, which, indeed, is the underlying principle of all despotic governments of state, society, military, and semi-martial or- ganizations, is factual, but not ethical, because it is not from man's free will, volition, and action. It makes a virtue of necessity, and THE ETHICS OF JUDAISM. 101 necessity is no virtue. Moral laws can be advisory only; if tliey be- ■come a compulsory necessity, tbey are moral laws no longer. Still, moral laws, which are the definitions of the true and the good in general and in particular cases, being necessary to man for the sake of certitude, must come from a higher or highest authority, and can be advisory only. This is the case with the Ethics of Judaism, as laid down in the Five Books of Moses, expounded by prophets and sages these three thousand years, and actualized completely or partly in the history of civilization. Let us consider this system of ethics. I. THE MORAL LAW IN MAN. The Book of Genesis is teleological. It contains besides other doctrines the narrative of the successive development of the God-idea in man — natural revelation — from the elementary conceptions of the first self-conscious man to that God-coguitiun in the fourth generation of the family of Abraham ; and the progress of the ethical doctrine developed and cultivated in man by this progressive God-cognition, as finally actualized in the life of Joseph, in which the moral imper- fections of the prior patriarchs disappear. In this book, at the very start of man's history, we find the Moral Law in man. In Genesis i, 27, it is stated that God created Adam in his image, as 'explained in ii, 7, by permeating the body of clay with the breath of life, which made that body a living person, a physical body en- livened with a God-like spirit, the spirit of wisdom and understanding the intellectual capacities (Exodus xxxi, 3 ; Isaiah xi, 2). Then (verse 28) we are informed: "And God blessed them (the male and female alike) and God said to them. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of heaven, and over all that creepeth upon the earth." The same blessing is repeated (Genesis ix) as bestowed on Noah and his sons as conditions of the covenant of God with mankind. Blessing in Hebrew, barach, signifies "bestowing of some addi- tional good" (fliltO n^Din) ; in this case it signifies, after the Creator had bestowed upon man the breath of life, the God-like spirit, he bestowed on him additionally the Moral Law as a part of his nature ; for these words of blessing contain the main elements of all moral laws in tlie following order: 1. The preservation op the human family by self-preser- vation AND preservation OF THE RACE IS THE FUNDAMENTAL MAXIM OF ALL MORAL LAWS. Also, according to the Talmud, this is the first divine commandment given to man, and this is not com- manded ; it is bestowed on human nature as a blessing. It obligates 102 ETHICS. him by his own nature to perform all the duties which teud toward the preservation of the race, the preservation and protection of life, limbs, and health, together with the meaus and conditions of sustenance, and forbids him to do the contrary thereof, as is evident from the addi- tions to this blessing in Genesis ix. Here is the broad basis of all moral laws upon which state and society primarily rest, expressed in numerous commandments in the Mosaic legislation, and in the legis- lation of all other civilized nations more or less perfect up to the climax of " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," " Thou shalt love the stranger as thyself," " Thou shalt not return the fugitive slave to his master," all of which, the whole category of commandments, in- cluding the laws concerning alms, support of the poor and needy, and protection to the weak and helpless, have this one aim, the preserva- tion of the human family, and rest upon the broad basis of man's in- nate Moral Law. If we take into consideration the feebleness and long helplessness of the human child, the feebleness and helplessness of man in his primeval condition, opposite not only the powerful quadrupeds, but also the lower animals from the serpent down to the venomous insects, and add to it the peculiar difficulty of man to secure a livelihood and protection against the inclemency of the elements; it must appear miraculous that the human family still exists and has increased to over fourteen hundred millions of individuals, when so many of tlie much stronger races are extinct and many more nearly extinct. The words of the divine blessing solve this mystery by pointing out the means and methods for the preservation of the human family, first by the term (mtJ'DDI) " Thou shalt or wilt subdue the earth" to yield sufficient sustenance for all, which man only can do. Tlie earth is subdued by labor only, thus this blessing contains: 2. The duty op labor contained in the innate moral law OF man. As it is every person's duty to contribute his share to the preservation of the human family, it could be no less his duty to con- tribute his part for the production of the means of its sustenance. He who contributes naught to the household consumes the bread of others, and counts in the miniis class of humanity. This also is out- lined in Genesis ix. Labor is a necessity of human nature. None besides the sick, the old, and feeble can live happily without it. Here then is the broad basis in the innate Moral Law to a category of moral laws most minutely expounded and expanded in the Mosaic legislation. The duty of labor found its way into the decalogue, " Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work." The genius of the Hebrew language coined the term Malach for angel, which is identical with THE ETHICS OF JUDAISM. 103 Melachah (work or labor), so that angeland working factor are identi- cal. Numerous are the Mosaic laws for tlie protection of the laborer and the fruits of his labor up to the admonition, "Thou shalt not keep over night till morning the wages of the hired man, on the very day thou slialt give him his wages." More even than this is ordained in Deuter. xv, when the person sold for theft is set free before the year of release, " Thou shalt not let him -go away empty ; thou shalt fur- nish him liberally out of thy flock and out of thy flour, and out of thy wine press, of that wherewith the Lord thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give him." This is more than wages. As to the social position of the laborer, the Law calls him invariably " thy brother," and knows generally of no distinction between man and man. All work, all must work, the priest at the altar, the Levite at music and song, the judge and the bailiff in the temple of justice, the teacher and the author, the musician and the singer, the husbandman and his iielp, the me- chanic and the wage laborer, all must work ; the Law has no room for idlers; all must contribute to the subsistence and progress of the human family, for such is the dictum of the Moral Law in man. " For not upon bread alone liveth man, but upon all tliat cometh out of the mouth of the Lord man liveth," as we shall see next. This accounts for the industrious habits of the Hebrews in all parts of their history. The next term of divine blessing is ITll " thou shalt or wilt have dominion over the fish of the sea, the" fowl of heaven and the creep- ing things upon the earth," viz., also those living beings which ap- parently are beyond the control of man. So the human race will not be exterminated by the animals superior to it in strength and com- bativeness. Man exercises his authority, maintains his dominion over the brute creation by his superior intelligence only and exclusively and in exact ratio to the lieight or lowness of iiis intelligence. Thus his blessing contains: 3. The duty of mental culture contained in the innate MORAL LAW OF MAN. It is not labor alone, it is intelligent labor which subdues the eartii, arrests the fury of the elements, and renders forces of nature subservient to man's purposes. It is not physical strength, it is the power of intelligence which holds dominion over brute crea- tion. Therefore like labor the mental culture, the growth and progress of intelligence, is every man's duty as his contribution to the preserva- tion of the human race. It is by the ideality and inventive genius peculiar to man, that education and progress of the race are possible, nd these rise or decline with the progress or retrogression of mental culture. S{) his inherent Categoric Imperative urges to mental culture as 104 ETHICS. it drives him to labor. Without mental culture as witliout labor oue belongs to the minus class of the race. Here we have with the broad basis in the innate Moral Law another category of moral laws most minutely expanded and expounded in the Mosaic legislation, the only legislation of antiquity which urges the education of the young as a solemn duty (Exodus xiii, 14 ; Deuter. vi, 7), and makes it every one's duty to learn to read and to write, not exempting even the king and the priest — the only legislation of an- tiquity which made wisdom and intelligence the ideal of the nation, as Moses verily told them : "And ye shall observe and do them (these laws), for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the peoples, who will hear all these statutes, and they will say only this great nation is a wise and intelligent people " (Deut. iv, 6). It has been advanced by wise expounders of the Law, that Moses de- nounced all pagan practices, all idolatry, all superstition of any kind, so rigorously, not so much to the greater glory of God, but to the ad- vancement of mental culture, because those superstitions and practices corrupt and cripple human reason, and retard its progressive develop- ment; and that his rigid spirituality in his presentation of the mono- theism which phantasy can not depict and reason can not define, was specially calculated to set his people to think, to reason on the highest ideal, to stretch the reasoning power to the unlimited universal, thus training and urging the reasoning faculty to dive into the fathomless deep of universal reason and redeem it from the bondage of narrow superstitions and crippling fetichism ; to advance mental culture as the path to the summuvi bonum. This accounts for the liberal reason of the Hebrews in all parts of their history, in the literature of their prophets, their sacred bards, their rabbinical, philosophical and poet- ical sages in all ages, and the rationalistic Psyche of the entire people although profoundly religious. This triangle, whose sides are the preservation of the human fam- ily, the duty of labor and the duty of mental culture, with the center of the innate moral law, comprises the whole system of ethics. With the growth of the God-cognition in Israel its provisions became more definite and more intensified, but no new principle was added. The moral attributes of God were revealed to the people, such as holiness, love, mercy, grace, loving kindness, benevolence, benefaction, long suffering, justice, equity, forgiveness of sin, iniquity and transgression, preservation of the good and the true to the thousandth generation, and neutralizing the effects of evil doing in the third or fourth gen- eration — not indeed to advance a new principle of ethics, but to fur- THE ETHICS OF JUDAISM. 105 • uisli man with the highest ideal of all ethics, the ideal of perfection, and to connect therewith : 4. The duty of man to strive continually to become god- like, TO come as neae as possible to the highest ideal of disin- terested GOODNESS, LOVE, MERCY, JUSTICE, HOLINESS, AND ALL THE OTHER VIRTUES WHICH THE INNATE MORAL LAW URGES AND OUR GOD- COGNITION DEFINES. This is expressed in the commandment given to Abraham, "Walk (conduct thyself) before meand becomethoii perfect" (Genesis x vii) ; in the admonition of Moses, " Thou shalt become perfect with the Lord thy God " (Deuter. xviii, 13) ; and according to the Rabbinical sages, also in the words, "Ye shall walk after tlie Lord your God" (Deuter. xiii, 5) ; to which we might add the injunction, " Take heed and hearken to all these words which I command thee ; that it may be well with thee and thy children after tliee forever, if thou wilt do the good and the right in the eyes of the Lord thy God " (Deut. xii, 28) — if thou strivest to do as God does, and to be as He is, holiness and goodness for the sake of holiness and goodness. II. THE MAXIM TO REGULATE THE ACTION, The maxim to regulate the doings of man must also be in Ihe innate Moral Law. This is evident from the whole tenor of the Mo- saic legislation, which is based upon Freedom. God, according to Mosaic revelations, is absolutely free. He created heaven and earth from His own free will. He preserves and governs them by the forces of His free will, which He can suspend or change at His will. He made man a free being, that can choose good or evil as did the first human parents, and as Moses often announces in unmistakable words (Deut. xi, 26-28; xxx, 15-20). The very fact that reward is prom- ised for the observation and punishment threatened for transgression in all parts of the Thorah shows that man is free in the estimation of the Mosaic legislation. This is most unequivocally expressed in Deut- eronomy V, 25. 26. The nation which God constituted is free. Its form of government is the theocracy, not a theocracy with a reigning priesthood, but with a reigning law, a most outspoken free democracy. God is the king, which means His lavv and His truth reign by a coun- cil of elders and the heads of the tribes chosen by them. Freedom is the underlying principle every-where, in God, state, and individual, hence there must be moral freedom limited only by the dicta of rea- son. This accounts for the spirit of freedom which never and no- where left the Hebrews. If freedom is the principle, it must be certain that man possesses it also in his moral life, in his innate Moral Law. Therefore any per- son who conscientiously regulates his volitions and actions to the best 106 ETHICS. of his knowledge in obedience to "the Moral Law in him is a righteous, man, however diifereut his doings may be from those ordained in the Law uf Moses. He is. one of the class whom the Rabbis of -old called D7iyn mow 'TDPl, " the pious conscientious non-Israelite, whose reward in life eternal is secured to him — something which all gentile creeds refuse to admit. The blessing of the Lord which contains the Moral Law was not bestowed upon Israel only or any other nation es- pecially; it was not conditioned by any creed, faith, law, or institu- tion ; it was unconditionally bestowed on man, on Adam and Noah prior to and independent of all creeds, faiths, laws, or institutions ; it is the heritage of the entire human family, the peculiar treasure of every human being who expounds the innate Moral Law to the best of his knowledge, and thus conscientiously regulates his volitions, mo- tives, and actions. Therefore the prophet said : " He hath told thee O man what is good," and not Israelite, O Greek, or O Roman. To all of which the triangle of duty is an infallible guide. III. THE ADVISORY AUTHORITY FOR THE SAKE OF CERTITUDE. The Thorah was given to Israel for the sake of certitude. It de- fines with precision what is good and right, true and beautiful in all cases uf human affairs, national, social, and individual. It reveals to man the ideal of moral perfection and prompts him to rise in the moral .'::cale toward this ideal with the convicti(m that it is the Eternal God who is so, does so, and teaches us so to do. It was given to all con- scientious men for their satisfaction, that they might know with certi- tude what is good and right, true and beautiful to be chosen, and what being the contrary thereof is to be shunned, " What the Lord thy God requireth of thee." Still it is advisory only, there is no coercion, there can be none, for this same Thorah teaches the principle of free- dom and the duty of reason and reasoning. The same Thorah teaclies that the moral value of any performance is commensurate with its motive. Coercion is an imposition, no inner motive at all, certainly no virtue, whatever action it produces is morally indifferent. The laws of the Thorah are definitions of the quiddity of the good and the right, the true and the beautiful, and also the contrar)' thereof. The Israelite is expected to know them, and they are to him the definitions coming from the highest authority. If he is conscientious in interpret- ing to himself the innate Moral Law to the best of his knowledge, he must be guided by the Thorah which is the best of his knowledge in moral matters. If he fails to do so, he fails. This to the best of my knowledge is a true synopsis of the Ethics of Judaism, higher than which I know of none. ETHICS OF THE TALMUD. 107 ETHICS OF THE TALMUD. By dr. M. MIELZINEK. Ethics is the flower and fruit on the tree of religion. The ulti- mate aim of religion is to ennoble man's inner life and outer life, so that he may love and do that only which is right and good. This is a biblical teaching which is emphatically repeated in almost every book of Sacred Scriptures. Let me only remind you of the sublime word of the prophet Micah : "He hath showed thee, O man, what is good, and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justice and love kindness and to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah vi, 8). As far as concerns the Bible, its ethical teachings are generally known. Translated into all languages of the world, that holy book is accessible to every one, and whoever reads it with open eyes and with an unbiased mind will admit that it teaches the highest principles of morality, principles which have not been surpassed and superseded by any ethical system -of ancient or modern philosophy. But how about the Talmud, that immense literary work whose authority was long esteemed second to that of the Bible? What are the ethical teachings of the Talmud ? Although mainly engaged with discussions of the Law, the civil and ritual Law, as developed on the basis of the Bible during Israel's second Commonwealth down to the sixth century of the Christian era, the Talmud devotes also much attention to ethical subjects. Not onlj"- is one treatise of the Mishna (The Pirke Aboth) almost exclusively occupied with ethical teachings, but such teachings are also very abun- dantly contained in the Agadic (homiletical) passages which are so frequently interspersed in the legal discussions throughout fill parts of the Talmud. It must be borne in mind that the Talmudical literature embraces a period of about eight centuries, and that the numerous teachers whose ethical views and utterances are recorded in that vast literature rank differently in regard to mind and authority. At the side of the great luminaries, we find also lesser ones. At the side of utterances of great, clear-sighted and broad-minded masters with lofty ideas, we 108 ETHICS. meet also with utterances of peculiar views which never obtained authority. Not every ethical remark or opinion quoted in that litera- ture can, therefore, be regarded as an iudex of the standard of Tal- mudical ethics, but such opinions only can be so regarded which are expressed with authority and which are in harmony with the general spirit that pervades the Talmudic literature. Another point to be observed is the circumstance that the Talmud does not treat of ethics in a coherent, philosophical system. The Tal- mudic sages made no claim of being philosophers ; they were public teachers, expounders of the Law, popular lecturers. As such, they did not care for a methodically arranged system. All they wanted was to spread among the people ethical teachings in single, concise, pithy, pointed sentences, well adapted to impress the minds and hearts, or in parables or legends illustrating certain moral duties and virtues. And this, their method, fully answered its purpose. Their ethical teach- ings did actually reach the Jewish masses, and influenced their con- duct of life, while among the Greeks, the ethical theories and systems remained to be a matter that concerned tlie philosophers only, without exercising any educating influence upon the masses at large. Furthermore, it must be remembered that Talmudieal ethics is largely based on the ethics of the Bible. The sacred treasure of biblical truth and wisdom was in the miiids and hearts of the rabbis. This treasury they tried to enrich by their own wisdom and observa- tion. Here they develop a principle contained in a scriptural passage, and give it a wider scope and a larger application to life's various con- ditions. There they crystallize great moral ideas into a pithy, impressive maxim as guide for human conduct. Here they give to a jewel of bib- lical ethics a new luster by setting it in the gold of their own wisdom. There again they combine single pearls of biblical wisdom to a grace- ful ornament for human life. Let us now try to give a few outlines of the ethical teachings of the Talmud. In the first place, teachings concerning man as a moral being : In accordance with the teaching of the Bible, the rabbis duly em- phasize man's dignity as a being created in the likeness of God.' By this likeness of God they understand the spiritual being within us, that is endowed with intellectual and moral capacities. The higher desires and inspirations which spring from this spiritual being in man, are called Yetser tob, the good inclination ; but the lower appetites and de- sires which rise from our physical nature, and which we share with 1 Aboth, 111, 14. ETHICS OF THE TALMUD. 109 the animal creation, are termed Yetzer ha-ra, the inclination to evil.^ Not that these sensuous desires are absolutely evil ; for they, too, have been implanted in man for good purposes. Without them man could not exist; he would not cultivate and populate this earth. ^ Evil are those lower desires only in^ that they, if unrestrained, easily mislead man to live contrary to the demands and aspirations of his divine nat- ure. Hence tlie constant strusrgle in man between the two inclina- tions.^ He who submits his evil inclination to the control of his higher aims and desires, is virtuous and righteous. " The righteous have their desires in their power, but the wicked are in the power of their desires." * Man's free ivill is expressed in the sentence : " Every thing is or- dained by God's providence, but freedom of choice is given to man." '" The ground of our duty, as presented to us by Talmudical, as well as biblical teachings, is, that it is the will of God. " Do his will as thy own will, submit thy will to his will." * Although happiness here and hereafter is promised as reward for fulfillment, and punishment threatened for neglect of duty, still we are reminded not to be guided by the consideration of reward and punish- ment, but rather by love and obedience to God, and by love to that which is good and noble. " Be not like servants, who serve their mas- ter for the sake of reward." ' As a leading rule of the duties of self-preservation and self-cultiva- tion, and, at the same time, as a warning against selfishness, we have Hillel's sentence : " If I do not care for myself, who will do it for me? and if I care only for myself, what am I ?" ^ The duty of acquiring knowledge, especially that knowledge which gives us a clearer insight in God's will to man, is most emphatically enjoined in numerous sen- tences: " Without knowledge there is no true morality and piety."' " The more knowledge, the more spiritual life." '" But we are also re- minded that " the ultimate end of all knowledge and wisdom is our inner purification and tiie performance of good and noble deeds."" Next to the duty of acquiring knowledge, that of industrious labor and useful activity is strongly enjoined. It is well known that among the ancient nations in general, manual labor was regarded as degrading the free citizen. Even the greatest philosophers of antiquity, a Plato and Aristotle, could not free themselves of this deprecating view of ' Berachoth, 61a and Midrash Bereshith, IX. ^ Midrash, ibid. ' Kiddushin, 30b; Berachoth, 5a. * Berachoth, 61b; Midrash Bereshith, ch. xxxiii. ^ Aboth, II, 15. 8 Ibid., II, 4. ' Ibid., I, 3. « Aboth, I, 14. " Ibid, II, 5. '» Ibid., 11. 7. " Berachoth, 17a, Aboth, III, 17. 110 ETHICS. labor.^ How different was the view of the Talmudic sages iu this re- spect! They say: " Love labor, and hate to be a lord."^ "Great is the dignity of labor ; it honors man." ^ " Beautiful is the iutellectual occupation, if combined with some practical work."* " He who does not teach his son a handicraft trade, neglects his parental duty."^ Regarding man's relation to his fellow-men, the rabbis consider _/t/s- tice, truthfulness, peaceableness, and charity as cardinal duties. They say, "the world (human society) resis on three things — on justice, on truth, and on peace."* The principle of justice in the moral sense is expressed in the fol- lowing rules: " Thy neighbor's property must be as sacred to thee as thine own."' " Thy neighbor's honor must be as dear to thee as thine own."" Hereto belongs also the golden rule of Hillel : "Whatever would be hateful to thee, do not to thy neighbor."' The sacredness of truth and truthfulness is expressed in the sen- tence : "Truth is the signet of God, the Most Holy."'" "Let thy yea be in truth, and thy nay be in truth."" Admonitions concerning faithfulness and fidelity to given promises are: "Promise little and do much."'* "To be faithless to a given promise is as sinful as idolatry." " " To break a verbal engagement, though legally not bind- ing, is a moral wrong."" Of the numerous warnings against any kind of deceit, the following may be mentioned : " It is sinful to de- ceive any man, be he even a heathen."'" " Deception in words is as great a sin as deception in money matters." '" Peace is considered by the Talmudic sages as the first condition of human welfare and happiness, or as they express it: "Peace is the vessel in which all God's blessings are presented to us and preserved by us." " As virtues leading to peace, those of mildness and meek- ness, of gentleness and placidity, are highly praised and recom- mended.'^ The last of the principal duties to our fellow-men is charity, which begins where justice leaves off. Prof. Steinthal, in his great work on General Ethics, remarks, that among the cardinal virtues of the ancient philosophers, we look in vain for the idea of loue and charity, whereas, in the teachings of the Bible, we generally find the idea of love, mercy, 1 Arist. Polit viii, 3. '' Aboth i, 10. => Gittin, 67a. * Aboth ii, 2. ^ Kiddushin, 29a. « Aboth i, 18. ' Ibid, ii, 12. " Ibid. 11, 10. ' Sabbath, 30a. '» Sabbath, 45a. " B. Metzia, 45a. " Aboth i, 15. " Sanhedrin, 92a. 1* B. Metzia, 48a. '^ Chullin, 94a. " B. Metzia, 58. " Mishna Oketzin iii, 12. "* Aboth ii, 10; iii, 12; v, 11 ; Taanith, 20; Gittin, 6a. ETHICS OP THE TALMUD. Ill and charity closely connected with that of justice.' And we may add, as in the Bible, so also in the Talmud, where charity is considered as the highest degree on the scale of duties and virtues. By words of charity man proves to be a true image of God whose attributes are love, kindness, and mercy .^ " He who turns away from the works of love and charity, turns away from God."' "The works of charity have more value than sacrifices; they are equal to the performance of all religious duties."* Besides these principal duties in relation to our fellow-men in gen- eral, the Talmud treats also very elaborately of duties concerning special relations, as the conjugal duties, the parental and filial duties, the duties toward the old and aged, toward teachers and scholars, toward the community and the country, and even of duties in regard to ani- mals. But the time limited for this paper does not permit us to enter into details. To these short outlines of Talmudical ethics, let us add only a few general remarks : Being essentially a development of the sublime ethical principles and teachings of the Bible, the Talmudical ethics re- tains the general characteristics of that origin. It teaches nothing that is against human nature, nothing that is incompatible with the existence and welfare of human society. It is free from the extreme excess and austerity to which the lofty ideas of religion and morality were carried by the theories and practices of some sects inside and outside of Judaism. Nay, many Talmudical maxims and sayings are evidently directed against such austerities and extravagances. Thus they warn against the monastic idea of obtaining closer communion with God by fleeing from human society and by seclusion from temporal concerns of life : " Do not separate thyself from society."^ " Man's thoughts and ways shall always be in contact and sympathy with his fellow-men." " " No one shall depart from the general customs and manners." ' " Better is he who lives on the toil of his hand than he who indulges in idle piety." "^ Thev strongly discountenance the idea of celibacy, which the Es- senes, and later, some orders of the Church regarded as a superior state of perfection. The rabbis say : " He who lives without a wife is"no perfect man."' " To be unmarried is to live without joy, with- out blessing, without kindness, without religion, and without peace."'" While, on the one hand, they warn against too much indulgence 1 Steinthal, AUegeir.eine Ethik, p. 108. ^ Sota, 14a. " Kethuboth, 61a. * Succah, 49a ; B. Bathra, 9a. o Aboth ii, 4. " Kethuboth, 11a. ' B. Metzia, 86a. 8 Berachoth, 8a. ° Yebamoth, 63a. "> Ibid. 62a. 112 ETHICS. {]) pleasures and in the gratification of bodily appetites and against the insatiable pursuit of earthly goods and riches, as well as against the inordinate desire of honor and power ; on the other hand, they strongly disapprove the ascetic mortification of the body and abstinence from enjoyment, and the cynic CDntempt of all luxuries that beautify life. They say : " God's commandments are intended to enhance the value and enjoyment of life, but not to mar it and make it gloomy."' " If thou hast the means, enjoy life's innocent pleasures."^ " He who de- nies himself the use of wine is a sinner."" "No one is permitted to afflict himself by unnecessary fasting."* "That which beautifies life and gives it vigor and strength and even riches and honor are suitable to the pious, as agreeable to the world at ^arge." ' Finally, one more remark: Tiie Talinnd has often been accused of being illiberal, as if teaching its duties only for Jews toward fellow- believers, but not also toward our fellow-men in general. This charge is entirely unfounded. It is true, and quite natural, that in regard to the ritual and ceremonial law and practice, a distinction between Jew and Gentile was made. It is also true that we occasionally meet in the Talmud with an uncharitable utterance against the heathen world. But it must be remembered in what state of moral corruption and degradation their heathen surroundings were at that time. And this, too, must be remembered, that such utterances are only made by in- dividuals who gave vent to their indignation in view of the cruel per- secutions whose victims they were. As regards moral teachings, the Talmud is as broad as humanity. It teaches duties of man to man without distinction of creed and race. In most of the ethical max- ims, the terms Adam and Beriyoth, "man," "fellow-men," are em- phatically used. In some instances, the Talmud expressly reminds that the duties of justice, veracity, peacefulness, and charity are to be fulfilled toward the heathen as well as to the Israelites." "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself;" this is, said R. Akiba, the all embracing principle of the divine law. But Ben Azai said, there is another passage in Scriptures still more embracing; it is the passage (Gen. v, 2): "This is the book of the generations of man ; in the day that God created man, he made him in the likeness . of God." * That sage meant to say, this passage is more embracing, since it clearly tells us who is our neighbor; not as it might be mis- understood, our friend (mly, not our fellow-citizen only, not our co-re- ^ Yoma, 85a. ' Erubin, 54a. ^ Taanith, 11a. * Ibid. 22b. * Baraitha Aboth, 8. " f. i. Gittin, 61a. ETHICS OF THE TALMUD. 113 Jigioiiist only, but since we all descend from the common ancestor, since all are created in the image and likeness of God, every man, every human being is our brother, our neighbor whom we shall love as ourselves. The liberal spirit of Talmudic ethics is most strikingly evidenced in the sentence : " The pious and virtuous of all nations participate in the eternal bliss," ' which teaches that man's salvation depends not on the acceptanee of certain articles of belief, nor on certain cere- monial observances, but on that which is the ultimate aim of religion, namely, Morality, purity of heart and holiness of life.^ ' Siphra on Lev. xix, 18. ' Tosephta Sanhedrin, ch. xiii ; Maimonides Yad Hachazaka, H. Te- shjjiba iii, 5; H. Melachim viii, 11. 114 ETHICS. SYNAGOGUE AND CHURCH IN THEIR MUTUAL RELA- TIONS, PARTICULARLY IN REFERENCE TO THE ETHICAL TEACHINGS. By dr. K. KOHLER. Among the wondrous exhibits of this World's Expositiou, the Religious Parliament just opeued justly claims the greatest attention, for no matter what it may actually accomplish, it is in itself the token and pledge of the approaching realization of the glorious dream of Israel's lofty seers, the time of universal brotherhood of men and of the acknowledged universal Fatherhood of God. The Executive Board of this Religious Congress have manifested a high sense of justice in according the place of hotior to the .ancient Synagogue, the Sons of Abraham, who since the dawn of history have been intrusted with the charge of proclaiming the one God every-where in order to be a blessing to all nations on earth. Not only as mother of the Church, but as holding forth this great promise of peace to united mankind, the Synagogue stands here the first in the race. Well, then, speaking on behalf of the Synagogue, I wish to bring the message of peace and good will, tbe sincere offer of fellowship to all religious bodies represented, but especially to the Christian Church, flesh of our flesh and spirit of our spirit, aud emphasize the fact, too often overlooked, that Synagogue and Church represent but the differ- ent prismatic hues and shades, refractions of the same divine light of Truth, the opposite polar currents of the same magnetic power of Love. Working in different directions and spheres. Synagogue and Church supplement and complete one another while fulfilling the great providential mission of building up the kingdom of truth and righteousness on earth. The erroneous impression of niost people, learned or laymen, is that Judaism is identical with the Old Testament, which represents the rigidity and harshness of the law, while Christianity, founded on the New, holds forth the sweet and gentle sway of love. The German schools of Hegel and Schleiermacher went so far even as to set it down as an axiom, that whatever is liberal, cheerful, and humane in Christian tliought and culture, is due to the genius of Hellas, and SYNAGOGUE AND CHURCH. 115 whatever is fanatical aad austere emanates from the Semitic or Hebrew source. Seniitism against Aryanism was the watchword of David Friedrich Strauss and Ferdinand Christian Bauer before young Renan found the scientific formula which, under the baneful name of Anti-Semitism, has done such great harm when once thrown as a battle-cry and a fire- brand among the masses. Thank Heaven, historical research has be- gun to bridge the wide gulf and to realize that the Synagogue holds the key to the mysteries of the Church. For after all, Jesus and his Apostles were both in their life and teaching Jews. From the Jewish Synagogue they caught the holy fire of inspiration to preach the com- ing of the Kingdom of Heaven, for which they had learned to pray, while sending up their daily incense of devotion to the " Father in Heaven." The Synagogue was the center of their activity. There they went from Sabbath to Sabbath to offer the gospel to their Jewish brethren, and from there to enlist the attention of the pagan world around. In the Synagogue they found the sick and sorrow-laden in wait of their work of relief and miraculous cures. From times im- memorial, every Jewish town or settlement throughout the vast lloman, Syrian, and Persian empires had its meeting^place for common worship and study of the law, and last, not least, for the support of the poor, the sick, and the stranger, yea, a feature which has thus far escaped the notice of writers, also for the reception, instruction, and protection of the Jewish Proselyte. These Synagogues, called by Philo schools of wisdom and virtue, prepared and plowed the soil for Christianity to reap the harvest with the large means and forces at its command. "I was hungry and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me iu, naked and ye clothed me ; I was sick and ye visited me in prison ; and ye came unto me; for whjjstever ye did to the least of my brethren, ye did it unto me." In these beautiful words of the Son of Man, who as a Judge of the nations addresses the good ones in the future Judgment, Jesus refers to the organized charity work done under the roof of the Synagogue by the Essene brotherhood, and the idea expressed corre- sponds exactly with the Talmudical word : He who receives a stranger with Abraham-like hospitality, receives the majesty of God, the Shechhia. The entire institution of the Synagogue, unlike the Temple with its priestlv sacrifice, is the creation of the Chasidim and Anavim, "the pious" and "humble ones," in the exile who first poured forth fervent prayers to God as abinu ("our Fatlier"); who composed the world's matchless treasury of inspiration, comfort, and devotion, the 1 16 ETHICS. Psalms; from whose circles emanated works of such lofty ethics as the books of Job and of Jonah, Tobit and the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. It is a pity that the Essene traditions and records have not yet received the full attention they deserve, or else there could be no longer any dispute whether the claim of priority for the Golden Rule is due to Jesus of Nazareth or to Hillel, the Jewish master, forty years his anterior. Two centuries before Hillel, Philo, and Josephus, we hear already the maxim inculcated by the sons of Jacob, the Twelve Patriarchs : " Love God, thy maker, with all thy life, and love thy neighbor with all thy heart. Forgive him if he has insulted thee, and if he plots evil against thee, pray for him and do him acts of kindness, and the Lord will redeem thee from all evil." Jjove for God, love for man, and love for virtue and fortitude or self-consecra- tion — these were the three rules after which the Essene brotherhood fashioned their lives while striving for the attainment of the Holy Ghost and for that perfection which was to open for them the gates of bliss in the Kingdom of Heaven. They corresponded with the trio of virtues given iu Micha vi, 8 : " Thou hast been told, man, what is good and what the Lord, thy God, requires of tliee: To do Justice, love Mercy ,_ and walk humbly as an Essene (zena') with thy God," or with the three virtues singled out by the Psalmist ; " Who shall as- cend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand on His holy ground ? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart and lips not defiled by profanity." How remarkable, then] to find John the Baptist as he stood on the shore of the Jordan to invite allithe sinners to wash off their sins in the river, and cleanse their souls by repentance, in preparation for the Kingdom of Heaven that was near, preaching, according to Jo- sephus, the same three rules of Essene life: Love of God, love of man, or righteousness, and love of virtue or fortitude of holiness. There was undoubtedly the power of a great originality felt when this re-risen Elijah had raised the cry of the speedy coming of the Messiah while hurling his bitter execrations against the hypocrites, those Zehuim or chameleon-like vipers that shine in all colors of piety, relying on Abrahai)>'s protection at the gates of hell. Jesus, the young Galilean, was seized by the same prophetic impetus, at first using almost the identical words of his forerunner or master. There was no reason why he should antagonize the teaching of the synagogue any more than John the Baptist did. Was not the very prayer, the so-called Lord's prayer, he taught his disciples according to Luke, prompted by a similar prayer John the Baptist had taught his follow- SYNAGOGUE AND CHURCH. 117 ers? But he was far from rejecting the old morning prayer of the synagogue. When asked what he took to be the foremost command- ment, he began like any Jew, used from boyhood up to begin the day with the benediction for the light and the law, followed by the Shma, with that ancient watchword : " Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and tliou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart;" and then he declared as the next one: "Love thy neighbor like thyself." But we have the emphatic declaration from his own lips : " Think not that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets, I came not to destroy but to fulfill, for verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth shall puss away, one iota shall in nowise pass away from the Law till all be accomplished." Never was the so-called Sermon on the Mount intended to supplant the Law of Sinai, as the gospel of Mat- thew would have it. According to the far more exact report of Luke, it was the solemn consecration of the disciples to their great task of living in a state of poverty, privation, and contempt while going forth to preach the Kingdom of God. It was the Torath or Mishnath Chasidim, a code of ethics not intended for the many, but for the few elect, for those forming a holy congregation within the Congregation of Israel, the ideal servant of God, who gives his back to the smiter, only eager to be the light, and the lasting covenant of salt to hu- manity in the midst of decaying earthly life. " Tiie lovers of God take insult and contumely and resent not, knowing that when they depart this earth the)' will shine like tiie sun in its full glory." This is the Talmudic version of the same Esseue teachings as were couched by Jesus in the well-known vvords; " If you love only those that love you, if ye only reciprocate kindness and love when you are sure of its return, what are you more than tlie Amine Haaretz, the careless and sinful people of the laud (not Gentiles as tiie Greek writers put it). " You who desire to be sons of the Most High and to have God as Father dwell in your midst, you are expected to love your enemies, to -do good to those that hate you, to bless those that curse you, and pray and fast for those that insult you. Let people in general, the men of little faith, the Ketane Emunah, be anxious, saying: " What shall we eat? What shall we drink? Or wherewithal shall we be clothed ? As for you who ought to be heroes of faith, Baale Emunah, who read daily the chapter of the manna, the bread which rained daily iu the wilderness for the good and for the bad, take no thought for the mor- row. Behold the birds of heaven. They sow not, neither do they reap, yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Behold the lilies of the field, whose exquisite purple color reminds us in their very name, ' King Lilies,' of all the splendor of King Solomon's robes, and they 118 ETHICS. eclipse it, yet. Has not each Hair on your head its own channel of nurture in order not to interfere with the others? How much more is every human being provided for in God's paternal care !" All these beautiful sayings dropped from the lips of the Jewish Essenes of the Talmud as well as from Jesus. Before the maxim, "Lay not up treasures on earth, where moths and thieves may take them, but lay up treasures for yourselves in Heaven," was penned in the New Testa- ment, Monobaz, King of Adiabene, the Jewish proselyte, son of philanthropic Queen Helen, in the time of Jesus, preached it to his own greedy brothers. Let others guard against the transgressions of the commands: "Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not steal, nor swear falsely ! " You who wish to asceud the hill of God and not go down to hell's pit, beware of aoger, of calling your brother by names, of keeping sheep and goats that do the stealing for you, of swearing in vain or profaning the name of God. " Let thy yea be yea, and thy nay nay." This is the rule of the Chasidim. It was the boast and constant prayer of these Pious Ones that neither they nor their beasts or property should ever cause others to stumble. Hence the declama- tion of Jesus: "Woe to the man through whom stumbling cometh. It were better for him to have a millstoue hanged about his neck and be sunk into the bottom of the sea." Oh, how the blood curdles in our veins as we hear Jesus cry forth : "If thy right eye, or thy right hand cause thee to stumble, cut it off and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not thy whole body go to hell." Yet the Galilean preacher was not the only one who used this phrase. R. Tarphon has the identical saying in the Talmud, and even the threat of Gehenna's fire against him that Justs after another one's wife by the mere clasping of hands, is derived from Scriptures. THE TRUE CHARACTER OF JESUS. These instances, which could be greatly multiplied, may suffice to show that Jesus was a true son of the Synagogue. Still, it is a mis- take on the part of Jewish scholars to place him alongside of or even beneath Hillel, the liberal schoolman, and Philo, the mystic philoso- pher. Jesus belonged to no school. He was a man of the people. In him the Essene ideal of love and fellowship took a new and grander form. Unlike John the Baptist, he felt by the magic power of divine love drawn to the very lowest of his fellow-creatures. With true greatness of mind, he sat down with those shepherds, publicans, and sinners, who, in the eye of liis brother-Essenes, were doomed, and whose very touch seemed to them to be polluting, and ate and drank with them, saying : "I have come to save the lost sheep of Israel, not SYNAGOGUE AND CHURCH. 119 the healthy but the sick are iu need of the physician." There were Essenes who would not mind pollution while teaching the Law, say- ing: " Can the law be defiled? As well may fire or the great ocean, the fount of purity, be contaminated." In similar manner, Jesus as- serts : "The heart that engenders evil thoughts is impure, not the hand. O ye Pharisees, ye cleanse the outside and leave the inward parts filthy with wickedness. Of you hypocrites, Isaiah well said: ' With their lips they draw near me, but their hearls are far from me.' " This is the language of a prophet, a bold reformer. There was at least one school of the Pharisees, that of Sharamai, who dis- countenanced arbitrariness and licentiousness in regard to divorce. Among them, R. Eliezer said : "The altar of God is covered with tears when the wife of man's youth is divorced, for ' I hate the putting away,' saith the Lord through Malachi." Jesus goes straight to the bottom of the truth, saying: "God spoke: The twain shall be one flesh. What God has joined together, let not man put asunder." The same sweeping force of a great truth is voiced by him in regard to the adulterers. The ancient saints of Jerusalem would release the woman suspected of adultery from the ordeal prescribed ' in the Law, when the husband is not perfectly free from blame. Jesus put it in still bolder form : "Let him that is without sin first cast a stone at her." Did not the Essene, Simon ben Jochai, declare the Law of the prodigal son iu Deuteronomy xxi, 18, to be but a symbolical lesson, yet of no practical bearing? Jesus, in his profound sympathy with the erring, went farther still and suggested in his parable that the prodigal son might turn out the better one after allj And with the same courage of true love with which he reclaimed the sinner, he solicited the company of woman, the very target of Satan's arts and tricks in the eyes of the Essenes, and broke the power of her doom. At his awe-inspiring presence, Mary Magdalene, whose long hair-locks were the very network of evil spirits to entangle men into adultery, according to Talmudical tradition, melted into tears of repentance, to become his most faithful follower to the very grave and the first witness of his resurrection. With the same freedom of the spirit, he loosens the fetters of the Sabbath laws. To be sure, the Essene brotherhood had turned the somber and austere Sabbath of priestly tradition into a day of festive cheer and thanksgiving, of social and spiritual elevation and comfort. Still the schools clung fast to the letter, forbidding even the caring of the sick, until the saints of Jerusalem, of whom Simon ben Menasea was one, declared: "The Sabbath was given to you, not you to the Sabbath." Yet how in a case of ailment without danger? Quick to 120 ETHICS. penetrate into the principle of Essene love, Jesus pursued his work of healing on the Sabbath, saying: "The Sabbath is given to man, not man to the Sabbath." And so in regard to t!ie plucking and eating ears of corn in the week preceding the Omer or thanksgiving sacrifice of corn (the second Sabbath or week of the First Month— the term in Luke being misunderstood). Here certainly was a master mind, a great iudividuality, a relig- ious genius, while at the same time a true Essene, the paragon and acme of the order of Chasidim. But Providence had designated him to be more than preacher and saint. He died as martyr of the EssenS principle. He was not the first to denounce the greedy house of the High Priest Hanau. The Talmud has preserved the prediction of an Essene father to the effect that "strife and greed will be the ruin of the second temple, just as murder and idolatry were that of the first, but (according to Jeremiah xxxi, 6), there will the Notzrim (watch- men), come from Mount Ephraim, under the cry: Yahve Hosha, "Lord save the people of Israel." Did these remarkable words ring in the ears of Jesus of Nazareth, as he, bursting forth into a fire of just indignation at seeing Jerusalem with its temple turned into a poultry and cattle market and money-exchange for the priestly house of Hanan, raised the cry that shook the temple to the very core : " Is is not written : ' My House shall be called a House of Prayer for all na- tions ;' but ye made it a den of thieves.'' Surely, the moment he seized the tables and chased money changers out of the temple precincts, a new spirit must have taken hold of him, he must have realized something like a Messianic calling of his. And who can tell whether at that mo- ment, so full of awe, he may not, while referring to that ancient pro- phecy of the Notzrim in Jeremiah, have spelled forth the holy name of Jehovah, combining it with his own name, Joshua of Nazareth, so as to fill the very air about him with sights and visions of the Son of Man in the clouds and at the same time shock and alarm the bystand- ers with the blasphemous word or act of a " seducer," corrupter," " blasphemer" and "magician." From that hour, on, he knew that he would be, as he said, "delivered to the high priest and Sanhedrin to be condemned to death, and then handed over. to the Gentiles to be mocked, scourged and erncified." He fell a victim of his Essene zeal for the true sanctuary of God at the hands of his Roman executors and his cowardly Sadducean judges. There was no reason for the Jewish people at large nor for the leaders of the Synagogue to bear him any grudge or to hate the noblest and most lofty-minded of all the teachers of Israel. It was the anti-Semilism of the second cen- tury Church that cast the guilt upon the Jew and his religion. Jesus SYNAGOGUE AND' CHURCH. 121 died praying for the forgiveness even of his cruel murderers — a true Essene Jew. THE EARLY CHURCH. Before the church turned into a persecutor of the innocent Jews, the followers of Jesus, the crucified Christ, were perfect Jews them- selves. Let me call special attention to the remarkable fact, not no- ticed as yet, as far as 1 can see, by any theologian, Jewish nv Chris- tian, that the entire order of prayers for the evening, for the morning and the Sabbath, was word by word taken from tlie Synagogue and preserved in the last two Boolis of the Apostolic Constitutions, a col- lection belonging to the second century. These early Christians never dreamgd of beholding in their departed Messiah any other than a human being, lifted by his saintly martyrdom as the pure white lamb of God up to the throne of heaven, working, by his very death, as the Man of Sorrow, 'the ideal saint and sufferer of the 53rd chap- ter of Isaiah, atonement for their sins. And if they saw him in spir- itual garb right near them as companion and brother at their Essene love-feasts, they beheld in him only the first among the children of God, the embodiment of all Essene virtue and holiness, the very ideal of greatness and tenderness, yet still a man and a brother, in heavenly luster shining like the sun. There is nothing in the oldest Apostolic teaching and Church manual for proselytes that was not directly taken over from the Essene tradition. Only when the simple life of Jesus was no longer remembered as a grand human pattern of purity and love, but from an atoning high priest or Passover lamb turned into a inetaphysical principle of the world, the Logos or creative word of God; when he, who in his great humility declined even the title of " good master" because it belonged to none but God alone, was lifted above the reach and ken of humanity to be the inborn Son of God turned flesh ; when finally all the mythological and gnostic elements of Egypt, Syria and Alexandria were blended with the nature of the man Jesus, then the leaders of the Synagogue apprehended danger for the pure monotheistic faith in the keeping of Israel and rejected the Church as one of the many gnostic law-destroying heretics or Minim. Still the intercourse was not broken off altogether, neither the anathema of the Synagogue nor the Sunday service with its hail- ing of the light of the first day as symbolical of the newly-risen Sun of righteousness, could eliminate the Jewish character of the Church and Sabbath worship. With the downfall of Jerusalem's temple and the final overthrow of Judea, however, the prediction of Jesus seemed fulfilled. The victory of Rome established also the triumph of the Christian cause. The Church, making peace with Rome or Babel, the 122 ETHICS. beast of Satan of the Apocalypse, while disowning flie mother Syna- gogues, set out to win the world for the man-God, while the Syna- gogue with its untrammeled idea of the one God and Father, spiritual and holy, with its historical past and hope for the future, clung all the faster to the Law as its center and citadel. The Church rose like the sun over the nations, while amalgamating the Pagan elements. The Synagogue protested agaiust such compromise, while waning like the moon before the daughter religion; only hoping for a renewal. The Church, pointing to the temple ruins as the death warrant of an- cient Israel, became aggressive; the Synagogue was pushed into defensive, scattered and torn into shreds. The Church became the oppressor, the Jew the martyr; the Church the devouring wolf; Is- rael the lamb led to the slaughter, the man of sorrow from whose wound the balm of healing was to flow for the nations. The roles seemed exchanged. Sixteen hundred years of perse- cution, however, could not exterminate the remnant of Israel. The Synagogue proved its safeguard, its fortress and shield. Judaism re- mained, because its soul, the Law, was indestructible. MISSION OF CHURCH AND SYNAGOGUE COMPARED. Here, then, we come to the real issue between Church and Syna- gogue. It can not and ought not to be denied that the ideal of a hu- man life held up by the Church is of matchless grandeur. Behind all the dogmatic and mystic cobwebs of theology there is the fascinat- ing model of human kindness and love, a sweeter and loftier one than which was never presented to the veneration of man. All the traits of the Greek sage and Jewish saint are harmoniously blended in the man of Golgotha. No ethical system or religious catechism, however broad and pure, could equal the efficacy of this great personality, standing, unlike any other, midway between heaven and earth, equally near to God and to man. He was the ideal representation and sym- bol of the Essene brotherhood, nay, the perfect brotherhood of man personified. And -if the organizations of charity connected with his name were not new to those brought up under the shadow of the Synagogue, they became the marvel of the Gentile world and accomplished wonders there. Jesus, the helper of the poor, the friend of the sinner, the brother of every fellow-sufferer, the com- forter of every sorrow-laden^ tiie healer of the sick, the uplifter of the fallen, the lover of man, and the redeemer of woman, won the heart of mankind by storm. Of what avail was the proud philosophy of the sage, or the depraved religion of the priest to a world longing for God and for redemption from sin and cruelty? The time SYNAGOGUE AND CHURCH. 123 was ripe for a social upheaval, for a millennium, in which the proud ones would be humbled again and the little ones become great. Jesus, the meekest of men, the most despised of the despised race of the Jews, mounted the world's throne to be the earth's great King. Was this not a victory of the Jewish truth, the triumph of the humanity and philanthropy taught and practiced in the Syna- gogue ? There were three radical effects in the system of the Church. First, all the salvation preached, the love and charity practiced, were all made dependent upon the Creed. The rich treasures of the love of the Father in Heaven were all withheld from those who failed to recognize the sonship of Christ, the sole distributor. The world was divided into believers and unbelievers ; hence, all the fanaticism and cruelty toward heretics and dissenters. Secondly, to be a true follower of Christ, one had to shape life after the pattern of the Sermon on the Mount — -to renounce wife, wealtli and comfort, and lead the life of a monk or nun, offering no resistance to acts of injustice, and forget the claims of home and country, of state, and so- ciety, the demand of justice and manhood, of intellectual progress, and of industrial enterprise. There was no room left for civic virtue. The Church had to create a double code of ethics, one for the privi- leged class of monks and priests and another for the laic world ; one for the faithful and one for tlie infidel. Here was the door opened for every vice, to the eradication of which Je.sus had devoted his whole life. And the third fault of the New Testament ethics is that it turns the human gaze too exclusively to the life beyond the grave, forget- ful of the duties of life here on earth. True enough, the symbol of the cross had lent to human life a deeper pathos, and to sorrow and suffering a holier meaning. It has robbed deatli of its horrors and lifted the soul from an unsatisfactory existence into the realm of a richer and higher life. Hence, the sweetest strains of music, the sublimest flights of art and poetry emanated from the Church. What power of inspiration moved a Michael Angelo and a Raphael, a Palestrino and a Bach, a Dante and a Milton! What a crown of real saintliness adorns the brows of the Sisters of Mercy or the Broth- erhood of Misericordia ! What a nobility of sentiment is there in a Father Damien or in a La Casas ! And to the asylums for orphans and waifs, to hospital and poor-house, Protestant Christianity added the school-house and the reformatory, the family Bible, and individual freedom. Still, amidst the exclusive cultivation of the emotional side, the intellectual culture of mankind was neglected. Blind faith laughed 124 ETHICS. knowledge to scorn. The simplicity of ignorance became a virtue, and science a snare and a sin of the devil. Reason fell into disuse. Credo quia absurdum became the rule ; the free-thinkers were cast out as lieretics. The consequence was that the Church of Christ was finally split into Churches. The New Testament was found insuiScient to serve as basis for the social structure of mankind. The Reformation, in the endeavor to establish greater freedom and broader manhood, went back to the Old Testament, to the Mosaic Law. And even in our days, we saw Henry George, and before him, Proudhon, point to the Mosaic system of land and labor division as a pattern or snggestiou for their socialistic ideas and plans. It was the Synagogue that, before and with the Mosque, held up the light of culture and learning, the torch of science, at the time when there was densest darkness round about the Church. The Synagogue made study the first religious duty of the Jew. It was the father's pride ever since Josephus and Philo to have his sons trained well in the Law. The entire life of the Jew was soldier-like drilling for the sacred battle in behalf of truth. Let Temple and State sink into ruin, the school-house will save Israel from shipwreck, was the consoling word of Johanan ben Zakkai, the witness to the destruc- tion of the Temple. True, the Synagogue had no life, no ideal of human greatness to point at, as uplifting and inspiring, as was pre- sented by the Church in her Christ. All the greater scope was left for each individual to work out his own salvation. Instead of offer- ing one perfect pattern of humanity, Judaism holds forth as maxim : " God is the only pattern of holiness ; men are but strivers after the ideal." But while Judaism fails to offer a perfect human model of in- dividual greatness, it presents a far safer basis of social ethics than the Church does. The Decalogue is a better foundation to build on than the Sermon on the Mount. Society can not be reared on mere love, an element which is altogether too pliable and yielding. Justice and law are the pillars of God's throne. Love is but the shining countenance of the divine ideal. The stability of life rests on im- mutable law. The tablets with the eternal Thou Shalt ! and Thou Shalt Not! lend to the right and the true its awe-inspiring authority. Justice implies the right of every being. Altruism is fallacious if it disregards the claims of the ego. Saints are proper people for heaven ; the earthly life demands men of sterner stuff, of good sense and self- respect. Judaism is the embodiment of a noble contest for righteousness, independence, and truth. The Law rendered the Jew sober, practical, and self-reliant. Church charity often pauperized the masses. The SYNAGOGUE AND CHUROH. 125 poor Jew "as upheld and uplifted by discretion and good judgment combined with love. In the Synagogue, reason dominated over the mysteries of relig- ion. Ceremonialism was after all a good school of temperance and pri- vation for the Jew to concentrate his mind on the practical objects and aims of life. Dogma never became a fetter to winged thought, ror was the shadow of the dark beyond allowed to obscure the view of life. Whatever harsh things are said concerning the rigor of the law, the chief feature of the religious life of the Jew was its cheerful- ness. The Sabbath meant joy for every home, nay, for every heart, even for the homeless. In the midst of all the gloom of the Ghetto, the optimistic view prevailed. " No evil but works for the good" was the general maxim. Consequently there was a willingness on the part of the Synagogue to recognize also the soul of truth in every error in- stead of condemning the same. I wonder whether any father of the Church ever showed such good will to the Synagogue as the leading authorities of the Synagogue, Moses ben Maimon, the great thinker of Cordova, and the Castilian poet and philosopher, Juda Halevi, displayed toward both Church and Mosque when declaring that both Jesus and Mohammed are God's great apostles to the heathen, intrusted with the task of bringing the nations of the West and East ever nearer to God, the universal Father? And which of the Churches has a word to match the grand declaration of the rabbis niade at the very time when the gospels were composed, that " all the good and the just among the heathen have as good a share in the bliss of the world to come as the descendants of Abraham '' — a view which became the •general recognized dogma of the Synagogue. Thus, in the great battle between Moslem and Christian, between faith and reason, between love and hatred, the Jew stood all through the ages pointing to a higher justice, a broader love, to a fuller hu- manity, ever waiting and working for the larger brotherhood of man. While standing in defense of his own disputed rights, the Jew helped, and still helps, in the final triumph of the cause, not of a single sect, or race, or class, but of humanity ; in the establishing of freedom of thought and of conscience, in the unfolding of perfect manhood, in the rearing of the Kingdom of Justice and Love, in which all creeds and nationalities, all views and purposes, blend like the rainbow colors of the one bright light of the sun. Judaism begins and ends with Man — " Not unto us, Lord, to Thy name belongs the glory." Not a siiigle man, however great, not a single Church, however broad, holds the key to many-sided Truth. Like this great parliament— humanity voices the truth in many forms and tunes. 126 ETHICS. Sinai, cloud-enwrapped, stands, out lonely in tlie desert, 'crying forth: Move onward, ye wandering shepherds. Golgotha, with its golden aureole around the brow of one single saintly sufferer, forms a high peak in the promontory of truth and love, but fails to offer stand- ing-room for all God-seeking tribes of mankind. But Zion, with all the hills of God and all tlie worshiping nations and ages round about, towers far higher yet. When life's deepest mysteries are once all spelled forth and God is sought and found, revealed and felt every- where, when to the ideals of sage and saint that of the perfect lover of man has been joined, the seeker after all that is good, beautiful, and true, then Church and Synagogue, Jew and Gentile, the pursuer of love and the pursuer of righteousness and truth, will have merged into one Church Universal, into a humanity in the likeness of God, into the city whose name is, " The Lord is there.'' UNIVERSAL ETHICS OF PROF. HEYMANN STEINTHAL. 127 UNIVERSAL ETHICS OF PROFESSOR HEYMANN STEINTHAL. By rabbi CLIFTON H. LEVY. We have before us the work of a moderu Jewish Philosopher, in whose absence we must look to his written self for light and instruc- tion. Let it be our task to find the "objectified spirit" of Steinthal in the thoroughgoing, lofty-minded pages warm from his brain and heart. What follows is presented as the digest of his work, in as faithful adherence to his words and spirit as possible.- INTEODDCTION. Ethics teaches wherein the perfection and destiny of man con- sist — treats of character, freedom, duty, and accountability. It is practical philosophy ; i. e., the philosophy (theory) of practice or the practical life of man. Superadded to the science must be the impulse to goodness. In Germany, ethics is relegated to the church, is con- sidered tiresome, and lacks the interest belonging to natural science, historical research, and anthropology. But Schiller and Goethe have shown the need of esthetics and ethics, so that no poem or picture lacking these may look for favor or immortality. Back of all theology and philosophy lies ethics as the moral con- sciousness manifest in moral life and proverbs. Primitive men include morality in religion as the command of God. In times of unbelief, noble spirits are needed to restrain those who think there is no moral- ity, no duty, no virtue. The task of ethics to-day is to implant idealism in the mechanical methods of the world — ethics alone can redeem us from mechanic- alism. The scientific form of ethics is in the treatment of the eternally moral laws of commerce, of labor, of ends and means, of good and duty, of socialism in good doing. No new categories are found in logic, no new virtues in ethics, but the principles lying behind these virtues must be improved and classified. Ethics takes its place among the sciences first in the light of freedom. The measure of freedom is the first step forward. It is 128 ETHICS. deductive in all its methods and distinct from the history of morals. Ethics is the theory of conscious judgment, is purely formiil, and ex- presses itself in the praise or blame of deeds. We feel ourselves as feeling, we ourselves are the only object of all possible feelings, which are modifications of ourself. Perception and thought are transitive, feeling is intransitive or reflexive. Only the soul feels, but there are feelings of s§use and of spirit — these are not subjectively distinguished but by the cause either bodily or spirit- ual — they depend on whether we feel a stone or a thought. The ego is the center of these feelings which are altogether a matter of rela- tion. We have the following classes of judgment according to the relation of feeling : 1. Is any thing pleasant? Judgment of feeling in narrower sense. 2. Is a means useful? Practical judgment. 3. Is a given knowledge true? Logical judgment. 4. Is a given form beautiful? Esthetic judgment. 5. Is a given deed moral? Ethical judgment. Ethics seeks the eternally valuable and humanly necessary, the moral may however be pleasant and useful. Ethical feeling is not awakened by the merely useful or pleasant, but by the beautiful and good. Something of the objective is superadded. Being not patho- logical but objective, a criticism is possible, as in logic. Their exist- ence is proven in facts — they are unified, and are not pathologic. Since what separates objective feeling from the pathologic connects it with knowledge (perceptions), it is not egoistic, not furthering or lim- iting life, not helping or harming, but only awakens feeling. It is not egoistic or egotistic, but omitting the we pronounces a deed good or bad, i. e. , it is objective. Moreover it is absolute fixing the worth and universal value. In simple feeling we destroy the pleasant by enjoy- ing it — in esthetics the pleasure of the beautiful is indestructible. Their reproductive force is greater than mere sensation by the addition of logical thought, e. g., axioms, principles, abstract laws, but bodily action exhausts force. The ethical-esthetic is altogether objective, dealing with forms of the object. Hedonism is not ethical, dealing with matter. The objective feelings are formal, seizing upon relations, not matter, as there is esthetically a. pure form, so is there ethically. Form is the unity of the many. The esthetic and ethical differ from the scientific, logical, and pyschological, because they are without ac- tivity for the power of existence. The statue may be material, but it is artistic in form only — form is the unity of the many, a synthesis making an ideal object only. Pure form is the idea, therefore formal UNIVERSAL ETHICS OF PROF. HEYMANN STEINTHAL. 129 feeling mny be termed ideal. Colors harmonize by the unity, not the quality of the separate colors. The separate syllables of a verse are immaterial, but the verse iis an artistic whole has an ideal existence, ideal and objective in esthetic feeling. This formal feeling may awaken the pathologic, the ethos has its pathos. Pathologic feeling is practically weighty — the formal is purely theoretic, a knowledge-feeling. Ethics is the highest human dominion. The deed does not make the ethics (ethos), it is practice and belongs to reality; ethics comes from ethical feeling only which judges the will and begets tlie deed. Then considering Ideas in general and the idea of good in partiadar the opposition between Idea and precept, law and concept, must be noted. There is no generally accepted definition of idea, but it may be said that the idea is a category of judgment, not of perception. Ideals precede ideas in human consciousness. Before the idea of virtue is conceived the father is a model to the son, the teacher to the pupil. The idea-content of virtue was at first only thought in this form of different models or types. Then the qualities were abstracted from a number of types. As it seems impossible to combine all beauties in a single face, so we have various ideals. The idea is the one creative thing, the one active power in mankind. The original model is the idea which man has, the existence (jf which he recognizes in later life. Any thing is beautiful or good because it corresponds to the model. The model is thus and so, because the idea furthers it. Formal feel- ing announces immediately the acceptation or rejection of any thing, the ground of which is criticism. The theory of criticism is the expo- sition of the content of the idea. The idea differs from concept and law in being the object of formal feeling — not lying in things, but in their relations. Laws contain material determinations, ideas only formal, therefore formal feeling is a^so called ideal. Neitiier is the esthetic idea a mathematical proportion or a law. The ethical forms a real unity of the various parts, not a mere combination of them, this being reached by intuitive proceduie, not by discursive. The idea of a picture differs from the concept, one knowing it as beautiful, the other as an actuality. The ear furnishes esthetic uni- ties, almost purely — the polysyllable presents a spiritual unity when heard. The special concept conceives a thing as actual, the esthetic makes an intelligible mode, e. g., a picture, a pure form. The idea needs homogeneousness and reciprocal penetration of the members of relations; tone combines with tone, color with color — there is a sort of ."piritnal chemistry. Categories are the f)rms of processes which, like ideas, are creative. The ethically good is objective in and for 130 ETHICS. itself, and not relative -to any one or any thing. Its province is to teach what is good or bad. Good and bad are the categories of ethics on which ethical feeling lays hold for the will. The will is good or bad objectively, not subjectively only. The good will is good only for the ethical feeling of approbation — it may be absolutely good. Tlie will, not as power, but according to conscious relations, is good — forms the ideal picture. When the form and struchire of ethics is to be considered, its character must be fidly stated. In speaking of the doctrines of virtue, good, and duty, we come to the consideration of their development. At first man sought favors of God by piety and morality, aiming at happiness, and this is the germ tliat is still in process of development. It was found that the most pious were not always the most happy, and it was concluded that the highest happiness lies in the possession of virtues. Ethics became the teaching of virtue, and then of the liighest good. Is the highest good virtue? Is duty virtue? Then ethics is duty. Good, virtue, duty form a circle lying in the formal feeling of moral- ity. Hedonism is impossible for ethics, because it is empiric. The popular doctrine of salvation is a refined doctrine of desire. Goods and duties are also empiric, furnishing facility only. Ethics teaches the good relations of will-ideas. Ethics resembles esthetics, in being the idea of the good, as the latter is the idea of the beautifid. We shall divide ethics into four parts for treatment. First, the es- sence of a good will; second, a full presentation of ethical life in human consciousness; third, of individuals, virtue, duty and char- acter, freedom, obligation and responsibility, the " phenomenology of morality." Then the depths of ethics, the basis of obligation, of eth- ical furtherances, the metaphysics of ethics. As to the style of ethics, it is not sermonic, but treats of the rela- tion of idea and reality, that ideas are relations of will — they are no- where and every-where. It depends upon history, as it is filled with the past, and lifts humanity to a higlier plane. It presents what. is eternally good, praiseworthy and true. There is a distinctly ethical judgment, and the difference in morals does not impugn the absolute character of ethical ideas. No one can develop ethics a priori, losing sight of man's struggles in morality ; it analyzes morality. We trace the psychological processes of ethics, holding in view, not the individual, but (as seen in the fourth part) the ideal essence of humanity, without iguoring experieuce. But ethics is formal and history is material; it can deal with the abstract only. Moral laws are mere ideas with no relation to power or matter. Ethics teaches with consideration of what has been, what should be; it teaches tlie eternal form of will with UNIVERSAL ETHICS OF PEOF. HEYMANN STEINTHAL. 131 the inner ought, not considering must or can. The law of freedom is the content of the moral command of ethics. We should speak of moral commands, not of moral laws. Freedom is not real — a must, but a should, a command, a holy obligation. So much by way of introduction. PAET r. The first part treats of the ethical doctrines of Ideas. The ethical ideas must treat of all possible objects of the will, not as psychologic, but as facile and quiescent, and also of the relations between wills. The ideas may be thus enumerated : 1. The idea of ethical personality on which rests the adjustment of every will to ethical ideas. That the judgment of self so trained pleases, and the non-performance displeases. 2. The ethical personality bears a similar relalion to others of the same kind, including them in itself, and aiming at furthering them. Well-wishing. 3. Two, several, many combine their wills into one, produce the idea of unity. 4. Each ethical personality gives like regard to the other, that the will of others for their own will is so far limited that it does not thwart it, but is acknowledged and sanctioned. The idea of Right- eousness. 5. The idea of perfection finally lies in the grade in which the ethical personality establishes ethical ideas in controlling force over its will. Each idea is independent, no one derived from the others, only in the form of will or mind. This form supports the will as the essence of intelligible rule. The ideas are in so far dependent as they complete or supplement one another. Each idea presents all morality from one side, all being synonymous to one another and morality. The three ideas, well-wishing, union and righteousness, are the three possible ac- cords of movements of the will. As man reasons without knowing logic, so unconsciously he judges ethically. Ethical science aims to raise this ethical conscious- ness to clearness and precision, as logic does speech and thought. The first point concerning the moral persouality is that ethical character demands judgment and it demands not only the harmo- nizing of the will with the ethical model, but must finally develop the will. The will must be subserved under an ethical idea. We can not think of the idea without thinking of the will. Ethical insight must compel the will to act, and impel to the formation of resolution. The first ethical idea is thus formulated. "That will alone is satisfac- ] 32 ETHICS. tory tomau (be it what it may, according to ethical examination), which is in harmony with ethical insight; and vice versa, the will which man resolves upon (notwithstanding ethical examination) in opposition to ethical insight is unsatisfactory. The will and ethical insight must be homogeneous. Ethics is the doctrine of mind — the will is only the active means of mind. Mind is the ethical peasonality, and it is by morality that a man becomes an intelligible person, citizen of the intelligible king- dom. He must be veracious and conscientious. Man has the facility for ethics and the relation of the individual to his idea makes charac- ter. Man is his own moral creator, artist and picture in one, the es- sential to character being morality. He must be in harmony with others, for egotism and lust are barred out of ethics. The second idea, well-wishing, is taught first and best in the Bible. Love is sought in vain among the four cardinal virtues of the other ancients. The Bible gives two forms of well-wishing — righteousness and love. Well-wishing consists in a relation of feeling between two persons, binding them together. One takes the other into his con- sciousness. His essence and activity are absorbed, joy and care are superadded. Tliis may be partial in energy or depth. It is truest in benevolence to all, in love and self-sacrifice — giving hope or alms. Its opposites are revenge, jealousy, envy, or vexing of any sort. The will, wish, thought of the interest of others should be the motive of our will. It is not like righteousness, a movement of character, but it is a dedication of the entire personality, helping others toward moral life. Thought and feeling are also ethical, in forming relations between personalities. Well-wishing is more than doing good, feeling is essential and primary, — will is secondary and accidental. The spirit of man is full of character — it is moral, because permeated by moral will, thinking, and feeling. The spirit is proportionate to be- nevolence. It differs from sympathy, as it does not wait for evil to show itself, and the latter is without will, psychological, pathological, and unethical. We may be filled (and should be) with benevolence for the wicked with whom we have little sympathy. Sympathy is a natural gift, well-wishing is an ethical idea. God is the living absolute goodness. Therefore man should serve Him with all thoughts, feelings, and efforts — that is the meaning of loving God with heart, soul, and might — this ethics furthers. Right- eousness will show what man owes to man — so much, that nothing re- mains for benevolence. These two go hand in hand. The Biblical command to love our neighbors displays the idea of legal equality, and Lev. xix presents our duties in an ascending eth- UNIVERSAL ETHICS OF PROF. HEYMANN STEINTHAL. 133 ical scale. It cotnmends kindness to the poor and the stranger— for- bids stealing, lying, robbery ; forbids the keeping of the pledge over night, taking advantage of weakness; enforces to righteousness in judgment, forbidding slander, hatred, oppression, even of enemies. As monotheism perfected right, it also deepened right. The third idea — Union — is the essence of all construction— the foundation of society as a community for working together. Not merely similarity of spirit or moral essence, but a union is formed for a common purpose. We have the objective relation of will firming an idea distinct from well-wishing. Union is for an end, not merely mutual like benevolence. Uuiou destroys egotism, making each for all and all for each. The combination must be for good ends or it is out of harmony with the ethical idea. From good men only does good come. The bad want what they do not need, and do not want what they do need ; but they know what they are doing. A band of robbers is bound by egotism, not by the idea of union. Those unions are good which are formed for lasting, future benefit, and are not a fortuitous coming together like those in a car. Race hatred, class hatred, religious hatred, impede and prevent true unity.. The copartnership for gain is no higher ethically than the single merchant. A factory is an ethical unity only when culture has changed'its character from mere money making to a real unity. In political and religious bodies lie greater possibilities for thought of all. The spirits of many should be unified to the spirit of a unity. The adherence to our native land, our people, our religion, is the highest evidence of this idea in the moral life of men. Confirmation in a re- ligion makes a man religious, not being born into it. A man is a citi- zen only when he does something for the state. The unity of spirits is no quiescent relation, but is a moral deed. The union of idea may be formulated thus : " The single will and common will are forthwith absorbed into one another." The fourth idea — right and righteousness. Judicial and ethical right are very different, but right is never against good morals. The jurist condemns the thief for breaking the law; the ethical man censures him for being immoral. Ethically, we refrain from wrong, not because it is against the law, but because it is immoral. The jurist omits feeling — he regards the overt act, considers the act bv rule, not by idea. Right assists well-wishing by giving it room and removing hindrances, and therein it is moral. Right may be defined as " the system of conditioning by restriction, by wklch social, mural ends are made safe." The stream of morality guides the right. 134 ETHICS. which, as the science of right, is non-ethical, and becomes ethical only when motives are considered. Methods of trade are often selfish and not for the common good, instead of beiCg guided by the idea to live and let live. Right and duty should be conceived as one. Peace is the cradle of right — the proper peace which flows from the triumph of right, not might. Rights are innate ; we love rights because we are. Not right in itself is ethical, hut righteousness — considering the rights of others. The only positive right is the right of recognition of human worth, i. e. , our ethical personality, by considering our moral will. Righteousness coiisists in recognizing the worth of others, the value of their will, whereby the righteous become of value to others. The contest, not for right, but for the recognition of right, is in the highest degree moral — the striving for the recognition of right in the community is a highly moral task. Is right derived from the feeling of right, or vice versa f Codified law is built upon custom — even unwritten law is not to be violated. It is immanent in commerce and is developed with ever increasing complex- ity. The essence of right is threefold : it is objective in the law book and commerce, subjective in the spirit of those constituting the society of right, and last, moral. Man is within his right always by the recognition of right. The objective and subjective may disagree in the application, producing wrong right. Ethics is the judge above laws and maxims, is the feeling for right in the community — accord- ing to it, all history is the development of morality or of intelligible rule. When we view the right of punishment or coercive force, ethics censures its wrong use, giving no absolute rule of punishment. Ethics forbids the return of ill-will for ill-will. Punishment is warranted, only for betterment. The state has no right to do this, while society may. We may even have the combination of right wrong in excep- tional cases. Right, being purely formal, could not unfold itself freely without having been written down, so that improvement is possible. Laws are needed, to be fixed and certain. The ideal of just punish- ment is that the violator punishes himself by weakening his conscious- ness of right. In the life of a nation, the ethical personality is broad- ened and made intelligible. In Rome and England, where there was greater freedom, great characters were developed ; in Germany, where the development of right has been checked, the feeling of right is weak, while that of well-wishing is stronger. Right, unlike benevo- lence, is or is not — hut is not graded. The fifth idea, perfection, contains the final efibrt of ethics, and is synonymous with morality. Man should be more and more a moral UNIVERSAL EVHICS OF PROF. HEYMANN STEINTHAL. 135 personality. Becoming more perfect in morality is pleasing {to ethical feeling). Retrograding or standing still is displeasing. Equality dis- pleases. Ethics is not merely interpretative and analytic, like es- thetics, but announces man's duty to be the objectifying of the ethical ideas in consciousness in ever higher degree. Activity is de- manded of every one. Perfection must be of moral harmony ; the per- fection of evil is like a glass, full of emptiness. In practice and morality, the one changes circumstances, the other changes the will and causes harmony. As the wicked perfect evil, they deserve blame ; their perfection is the greatest imperfection. Imperfectiou may be in ethical insight or in will — either without the other is imperfect and unethical. Blind obedience is will without insight, unintelligible and unfree ; tyranny alone demands it. Strength and power are differentiated thus: as the former works, the latter rules; one is mechanical, the other ethical. Ideas have no strength, are not strong — but they may have power. For the idea of perfection, they reach the grade of the power \vhich the ethical insight has over the will. The power of ethical insight over bodily powers forms the moral character. Perfec- tion is proportionate to the love of goodnes.s — the perfect man works for moral ends with all his powers, he seeks for opportunities, and brings others to morality. The intensity of the love for the moral is the full power of the rule of ethical insight over the will. This in- sight must be broadened and intensified. Thought and doing are higher forms of benevolence — e. g., the advance from caring for the individual sick to the building of hospitals, etc. This idea rules tbe understanding for correct judgment and methods, industry, order, etc. Not character alone is furthered by the idea of perfection, but indi- vidual character. "That is like him," should be said of each and all. Any dogma that is ethical must not oppose what morality sets up. "God alone is Lord in heaven and on earth" means the good, the moral, is the only power by which human life is regulated — and there is no consideration of paradise or hell (Ps. Ixxiii, 25). Progression or retrogression expresses merely the relation, progress is relative. Ethi- cal insight should grow in loftiness of ideas and all clearness of view, in rule over the will — the means of presentation and morality should grow, just as physical means increase iu the technique of art. The means of presentation of morality is as a whole called culture or civ- ilization. All should work morally to further the rule of the intelligi- blf! spirit. Helping others is morality. The development of language and writing, the telegraph, the railroad, science — all are aids to this end. What is the Intelligible Rule? Its first element is a sell'-con- 136 ETHICS. scious, free spirit, dealing with all the activity of thought. By it only we live a spiritual life. It is the objective morality of the highest thought of mau, and its real deed, its absolute and highest worth. Man enters it, not by i'ate, as he enters nature, but by his moral activity. Science and labor assume a new meaning. Man perfects nature by cultivation (Ps. viii). The unified product of the human race is the combination of subjective morality and the objective moral regulation of the world. Ideas are the forces working in and behind all — they become objective as realized in each. PAKT IX. PRESENTATION OF IDEAS OE THE FORMS OP NEW LIFE. Morality, like the soul, is in every body; the upbuilding of morality is our highest good and our solemn duty. Desire is the feel- ing of power, and spirit has no otlier possession than activity. The house, state, etc., are the establishments of morality; are objective morality, established by moral work, and make moral life possible. The Family and the Home. — The home is the moral cell, the smallest structure of the moral organism, its heart and pulse, the hearth of benevolence. Marriage forms the smallest community. "It is not good for man to be alone; " it is impossible for a man to be good, true, fully human alone. There are four principal tendencies of morality — benevolence and grntitute, right and duty. In true mar- riage these melt imperceptibly into one another; their claim is grant- ing, their granting is tlie claim. It is one life divided into two per- sons. The two concerned first know each other in married life. They grow toward resemblance in character, temperament, habit, and even in appearance. The passion of youth is soon over, furnishing no ifi- stiiration. Passion does not make the exact choice — "only thee and none other." The hap[)y man or woman tries to be worthy of his or her liappiness ; the unhappy one searches for the defect and tries to remedy it. Divorce is the most sorrowful of necessities if tiie ethical end of marriage is impossible — if moral generalness and general morality can not be established. Children give to marriage a wider, moral task — make the full ethical school of life. Duty is proportion- ate to education both for parents and the community. The first human, moral feeling of the child is gratitude. The more feeling bond is between child and mother; the more earnest between child and father. The relations between brothers and sisters are a most important ' source of development, a preparation for life. The idea of right is freely developed; partiality does not arouse jealousy, but a sense of wrong. UNIVERSAL ETHICS OP PROF. HEYMANN STEINTHAL. 137 Labor, though mechanical, prepares for the ethical. Prudence distinguishes men from animals. It is derived from labor, as is breadth of view. A man's occupation has considerable influence in forming his character ; a farmer is apt to be higher morally than a shepherd or hunter. The last merely destroys, the second preserves, the first produces, and from him comes the division of labor, of produce, pro- tection, and the f(iunding"of a permanent home. At first men sacri- ficed to the gods to gain their good will, but as their judgment de- veloped (keeping pace with occupation), they formed the conscious- ness of the duties of benevolence and right; duties to God and men were considered as laws of God. The ideas of clothing and dwel- ling seem to have aroused the ethical ideas of shame and modesty. Man is ashamed to be an animal. Shame is not foolish ; man is no animal any more than a statue is a block of stone. Men cover the flesh to forget it. Good morals are a product of shame and modesty, or rather these are the guards of morals. True speech is that which praises the good and censures the bad. As physical existence is necessary for ethics, bodily purity is of importance ; the shelterless and unclothed lack and need morality. The house and clothes corre- spond to the person— show individuality. The community and its organization show mf)ral tendencies de- veloped from the home. It is not a mere number of houses, but a unity. Want leads to labor, labor to the unifying of powers; new wants are then awakened. Man is not simpl}' a pleasure seeker. The prudent man is never satisfied, and can always be happy, both ac- cording to the idea of perfection. The source of all advancement is not the desire for pleasure, but for work. Where one generation (the parents) is satisfied, the next generation (the children) is dissatisfied. History is an account of the self-elevation of man to constantly in- creasing morality. As the animal, functions are developed to ever higher activity, so are the spiritual powers ; there is a sharper indi- vidualization. The division of labor makes men more dependent on one another. Every series of needs and activities is objective morality constructing the rule of spiritual manhood over natural existence. Science is needed for art and religion, industry and trade, forming the perfection of labor. Babylon, Phoenicia, and Egypt were first scientific. Science itself is not moral, but the desire for it is moral. Parents, teachers, and schools are needed for instruction. There should be a younger community, while parental or parochial schools make the dif- ferences in station too distinct. They should learn human similarity and equality, and the schools should give that universal human and practical religious teaching so much needed. The church and school 138 ETHICS. should be kept apart. Men are iu so far irreligious as they are ir- rational and benighted. The test of the schools is in the citizens. Press and libraries are needed for further culture. Labor. — It becomes ethical by conscientiousness alone. Work as loell as possible ! Commerce works ethically in binding all men together for honesty, the unity of mankind becomes an active unified society. The ethical essence of trade lies in the confidence in honesty. There can be no business without credit. Confidence is good-willing, and rests in doing what is promised, keeping faith. The settlement of debts contains no ethical idea any more than price ; it is altogether material and needs no good will. Self-preservation is the nerve of trade. Trade demands no deceit. The general interest must be considered and uni- fied with self-interest. Commerce is the most complex of machines, demanding industry, order, punctuality, honesty, conscientiousness, trust, and self-sacrifice. It is the state of birth and school of morality. The ethical view of trade may be thus stated : 1. General and private interest may and should coincide. 2. The idea of self-preservation and satisfaction do not exclude ethics. 3. The ethical view of com- merce is the generalization of self-preservation and pleasure through right and truth. It becomes artistic and scientific. Art makes us see the ideal trutii of all appearances, forces us to recognize the ethical worth of circumstances in life for the rule of morality. The artist has his truth and objectivity, his morality as an artist. Music and the drama influence tiie formal feeling and draw us from egoistic interests toward interest in universal human fate. Luxury is not the true aim of art, but the' moral is ; it tries to make beautiful the unfortunate of the earth. In public museums it gives pleasure to all the people, teaching them to love the good and the beau- tiful ; this is its true sphere. Religion has the highest place, and is proportionate to benevolence, righteousness, honesty, conscientiousness, and truth. It is nothing or all. Insight needs inner power (will), love for the good ; religion is their inspiriting for all that is good, true, and beautiful. This may hold even for atheists, since belief is only a form of religion. When we recognize the source of goodness, truth, and beauty in God, re- ligion becomes the inspiriting of man for God. For the atheist it is an animation toward the " intelligible rule of all humanity." Religion is a special force in the whole of ethical life and of great power. The religious community is a union for its end. There have been errors doubtless, but the church has done much for morality, science, art, and civilization. It influences and permeates all of life, the real person- ality. It keeps us in purity, lifts us up, gives us power and trust iu UNIVERSAL ETHICS OF PROF. HEYMANN STEINTHAL. 139 the moral battle of life, trust in sorrow, moderation iu joy and good fortune, and makes us active iu all the affairs of life. Recreation is activity for no end but for itself. Play is the curse of ethical earnestness in life. It is warranted for assisting the recovery of the sick, or when it is employed to lift us to higher thoughts (Ex. xxiii, 1 ; xxxi, 17). The Sabbath seems to be given for spiritual recovery. State. — Rights and duties are always for ends iu the community ; the state and laws always for their overseeing. Eight is the end of the state, the state is the means. It must be either a social state or a rights state. It must watch over and not order, and should do noth- ing which individuals or corporations can do well. That state is ethically best which furthers the morals of its citizens, which awakes all the powers of the community and gives every man opportunity ac- cording to his power. It is ever striving to make positive right ideal. There should be an inner peace — not such as one would break if he had the power. Control by right means for high ends is ethical, so that a war may be ethical. The state has both the duty aud right of compulsion. The good citizen must obey laws, even those that he considers bad. The Citizen has the right to life, even as an unborn child — the right also to nurture and education. The child has the right to prove himself moral, by bringing himself to ethical activity. It is moral to consider a person as a person, not as a thief; each must judge the other ethically as a member of the state ; lies are outlawed, there is harmony between the person and society. The citizen is a free person, sacred in thought and religion, free for union and free in speech. Foolishness is sufficient punishment of the fool. Freedom of speech and press give religious freedom. Besides, he has the right to the choice of home, of wife, and of representatives. The duties cor- responding to these rights are those of obedience to law and payment of taxes. The schools should teach these duties and also admiration of the state. National unity comes from the equal ensouling of all society; the same well-wishing, feeling of duty, aud consciousness of right, taste for the beautiful, sense of truth, efforts for good. The similarity of ethical ideas in individuals forms a harmonious figure of all national life. The unity of national spirit finds expression in its classic literature. Property is ethically indifferent. Occupation or possession signifies a relation of person and thing. Property is a relation of a person to a community in regard to a thing. The right to property is only con- ditional, and the common weal takes precedence of rij^^ht to property. 140 ETHICS. All property is only a fee, of which the community is feudal lord. The ground of property is labor ; what a mau produces is his. Exaurim on Socialism. — It may be traced historically from Thomas More. Things are of no value, save as supplying, a demand, through labor and difficulty of production or talent needed. The worth can . not be paid, as ideal only pays for ideal. There is no difference whether the state or individual pays in money or material. There is no ethical activity as to mine and thine, no opportunity for objective right, no opportunity for benevolence in material Socialism. He will breathe a purer spiritual air without egoism. Man does not change his nature, but his circumstances in higher socialism. The amount paid for a great work buys ink and paper; appreciation is the real payment ; science will be helped. There will be no weakening of the powers of genius by need. The socialistic tendency of human life is an ideal to be desired ethically. 1. No moral consistency may be in- tentionally destroyed ; immorality destroys itself. Socialism is not to be made, but is to born of society. It is not a mere question of clothes. 2. State socialism is a contradiction in terms. It should be a free community of citizens, and should flow from our free united life. 3. It is no self-delusion, no mistaking of the present, no false hope for the future. The future will grow from the present; all good tends to this end. Absolute equality is foolishness. Be free within, despise vanities, fight distress, are the watch-words. Relations between Persons should be actuated by sympathy first, by well-wishing afterward. Those between master and servant are in the department of right, not good-will. Conscientiousness is a neces- saiy quality of service, whether recognized or not. Honor seems to be needed for merchant, mechanic, and citizen, as well as the ideal of faithfulness and skill. Consideration for the rights of others is also commendable and necessary, as evinced in giving room on the street, or apology for unintentional injury. The ethical idea of friendship is strengthened by putting aside the ego. Careless criticism of another is unethical : gossip is not even criticism. Well-wishing should not expect gratitude. Gratitude is good-will for good-will and a good deed, while envy needs no deed. The two Sexes. — Though woman may not equal man in bodily or spiritual strength, yet many women surpass many men, though their power is not alike in quality on account of the differing organs through which the strength works. She has a peculiar spiritual place, and applies general ethics well. The male and female spirit are mutually supplementary. She has the smaller and probably finer brain ; her power is smaller and weaker, but fine; man's is large and strong, but UNIVERSAL ETHICS OF. PROF. HEYMANN STEINTHAL. 141 coarse. Slio is the more sharply individualized. It is unethical to consider wonjan as a s-lave. The realm of ideas is divided hetween man and woman. Marriage is the feeling of in