IV

Israel disappears, too, in whole books of the Old Testament. What has

the problem of Job, the wisdom of Proverbs, or the pessimism of

Ecclesiastes to do with the Jew specifically? The Psalter would

scarcely have had so universal an appeal had it been essentially

rooted in a race.

In the magnificent cosmic poem of Psalm civ--half Whitman, half St.

Francis--not only his fellow-man but all creation comes under the

benediction of the Hebrew poet's mood. "The high hills are for the

wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the conies.... The young lions

roar after their prey, and seek their food from God ... man goeth

forth unto his work, and to his labour until the evening." Even in a

more primitive Hebrew poet the same cosmic universalism reveals

itself. To the bard of Genesis the rainbow betokens not merely a

covenant between God and man but a "covenant between God and every

living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth."

That the myth of the tribalism of the Jewish God should persist in

face of such passages can only be explained by the fact that He shares

in the unpopularity of His people. Mr. Wells, for example, in his

finely felt but intellectually incoherent book, "God the Invisible

King," dismisses Him as a malignant and partisan Deity, jealous and

pettily stringent. At most one is entitled to say with Mr. Israel

Abrahams in his profound little book on "Judaism" that "God, in the

early literature a tribal, non-moral Deity, was in the later

literature a righteous ruler, who, with Amos and Hosea, loved and

demanded righteousness in man," and that there was an expansion from a

national to a universal Ruler. But if "by early literature" anybody

understand simply Genesis, if he imagines that the evolutionary

movement in Judaism proceeds regularly from Abraham to Isaiah, he is

grossly in error. No doubt all early gods are tribal, all early

religions connected with the hearth and ancestor worship, but the God

of Isaiah is already in Genesis, and the tribal God has to be exhumed

from practically all parts of the Bible. But even in the crudities of

Genesis or Judges that have escaped editorship I cannot find Mr.

Wells's "malignant" Deity--_He_ is really "the invisible King." The

very first time Jehovah appears in His tribal aspect (Genesis xii.)

His promise to bless Abraham ends with the assurance--and it almost

invariably accompanies all the repetitions of the promise--"And in

thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed." Nay, as I

pointed out in my essay on "The Gods of Germany," the very first words

of the Bible, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,"

strike a magnificent note of universalism, which is sustained in the

derivation of all humanity from Adam, and again from Noah, with one

original language. Nor is this a modern gloss, for the Talmud already

deduces the interpretation. Racine's "Esther" in the noble lines

lauded by Voltaire might be almost rebuking Mr. Wells:--

Ce Dieu, maître absolu de la terre et des cieux,

N'est point tel que l'erreur le figure à vos yeux:

L'Eternel est son nom, le monde est son ouvrage;

Il entend les soupirs de l'humble qu'on outrage,

Juge tous les mortels avec d'égales lois,

Et du haut de son trône interroge les rois.

--there is the true Hebrew note, the note denounced of Nietzsche.

Is this notorious "tribal God" the God of the Mesopotamian sheikh

whose seed was so invidiously chosen? Well, but of this God Abraham

asks--in what I must continue to call the epochal sentence in the

Bible--"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Abraham, in

fact, bids God down as in some divine Dutch auction--Sodom is not to

be destroyed if it holds fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, nay

ten righteous men. Compare this ethical development of the ancestor of

Judaism with that of Pope Gregory XIII, in the sixteenth century, some

thirty-one centuries later: _Civitas ista potest esse destrui quando

in ea plures sunt hæretici_ ("A city may be destroyed when it harbours

a number of heretics"). And this claim of man to criticize God Jehovah

freely concedes. Thus the God of Abraham is no God of a tribe, but,

like the God of the Rabbi who protested against the Bath-Kol, the God

of Reason and Love. As clearly as for the nineteenth-century

Martineau, "the seat of authority in Religion" has passed to the

human conscience. God Himself appeals to it in that inversion of the

Sodom story, the story of Jonah, whose teaching is far greater and

more wonderful than its fish. And this Abrahamic tradition of free

thought is continued by Moses, who boldly comes between Jehovah and

the people He designs to destroy. "Wherefore should the Egyptians

speak, saying, For evil did He bring them forth to slay them in the

mountains...? Turn from Thy fierce wrath and repent of this evil

against Thy people." Moses goes on to remind Him of the covenant, "And

the Lord repented of the evil which He said He would do unto His

people." In the same chapter, the people having made a golden calf,

Moses offers his life for their sin; the Old Testament here, as in so

many places, anticipating the so-called New, but rejecting the notion

of vicarious atonement so drastically that the attempt of dogmatic

Christianity to base itself on the Old Testament can only be described

as text-blind. And the great answer of Jehovah to Moses's

questioning--"I AM THAT I AM"--yields already the profound

metaphysical Deity of Maimonides, that "invisible King" whom the

anonymous New Year liturgist celebrates as:

Highest divinity,

Dynast of endlessness,

Timeless resplendency,

Worshipped eternally,

Lord of Infinity!

And the fact that Moses himself was married to an Egyptian woman and

that "a mixed multitude" went up with the Jews out of Egypt shows

that the narrow tribalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the regrettable

rejection of the Samaritans, was but a temporary political necessity;

while the subsequent admission into the canon of the book of "Ruth,"

with its moral of the descent of the Messiah himself from a Moabite

woman, is an index that universalism was still unconquered. We have,

in fact, the recurring clash of centripetal and centrifugal forces,

and what assured the persistence and assures the ultimate triumph of

the latter is that the race being one with the religion could not

resist that religion's universal implications. If there were only a

single God, and He a God of justice and the world, how could He be

confined to Israel? The Mission could not but come. The true God,

urges Mr. Wells, has no scorn or hatred for those who seek Him through

idols. That is exactly what Ibn Gabirol said in 1050. But those blind

seekers needed guiding. Religion, in fact, not race, has always been

the governing principle in Jewish history. "I do not know the origin

of the term Jew," says Dion Cassius, born in the second century. "The

name is used, however, to designate all who observe the customs of

this people, even though they be of different race." Where indeed lay

the privilege of the Chosen People when the Talmud defined a

non-idolater as a Jew, and ranked a Gentile learned in the Torah as

greater than the High Priest? Such learned proselytes arose in Aquila

and Theodotion each of whom made a Greek version of the Bible; while

the orthodox Jew hardly regards his Hebrew text as complete unless

accompanied by the Aramaic version popularly ascribed to the proselyte

Onkelos. The disagreeable references to proselytes in Rabbinic

literature, the difficulties thrown in their way, and the grotesque

conception of their status towards their former families, cannot

counterbalance the fact, established by Radin in his learned work,

"The Jews Among the Greeks and Romans," that there was a carefully

planned effort of propaganda. Does not indeed Jesus tell the

Pharisees: "Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte"? Do not

Juvenal and Horace complain of this Judaising? Were not the Idumeans

proselytised almost by force? "The Sabbath and the Jewish fasts,"

says Lecky, doubtless following Josephus, "became familiar facts in

all the great cities." And Josephus himself in that answer to Apion,

which Judaism has strangely failed to rank as one of its greatest

documents, declares in noble language: "There ought to be but one

Temple for one God ... and this Temple common to all men, because He

is the common God of all men."

It would be a very tough tribal God that could survive worshippers of

this temper. An ancient Midrash taught that in the Temple there were

seventy sacrifices offered for the seventy nations. For the mediæval

and rationalist Maimonides the election of Israel scarcely

exists--even the Messiah is only to be a righteous Conqueror, whose

success will be the test of his genuineness. And Spinoza--though he,

of course, is outside the development of the Synagogue proper--refused

to see in the Jew any superiority save of the sociological system for

ensuring his eternity. The comparatively modern Chassidism,

anticipating Mazzini, teaches that every nation and language has a

special channel through which it receives God's gifts. Of contemporary

Reform Judaism, the motto "Have we not one father, hath not one God

created us?" was formally adopted as the motto of the Congress of

Religions at Washington. "The forces of democracy _are_ Israel," cries

the American Jew, David Lubin, in an ultra-modern adaptation of the

Talmudic scale of values. There is, in fact, through our post-biblical

literature almost a note of apology for the assumption of the Divine

mission: perhaps it is as much the offspring of worldly prudence as of

spiritual progress. The Talmud observed that the Law was only given to

Israel because he was so peculiarly fierce he needed curbing. Abraham

Ibn Daud at the beginning of the twelfth century urged that God had to

reveal Himself to some nation to show that He did not hold Himself

aloof from the universe, leaving its rule to the stars: it is the very

argument as to the need for Christ employed by Mr. Balfour in his

"Foundations of Belief." Crescas, in the fourteenth century,

declared--like an earlier Buckle--that the excellence of the Jew

sprang merely from the excellence of Palestine. Mr. Abelson, in his

recent valuable book on Jewish mysticism, alleges that when Rabbi

Akiba called the Jews "Sons of God" he meant only that all other

nations were idolaters. But in reality Akiba meant what he said--what

indeed had been said throughout the Bible from Deuteronomy downwards.

In the words of Hosea:

When Israel was a child, then I loved him,

And out of Egypt I called My son.

No evidence of the universalism of Israel's mission can away with the

fact that it was still _his_ mission, the mission of a Chosen People.

And this conviction, permeating and penetrating his whole literature

and broidering itself with an Oriental exuberance of legendary

fantasy, poetic or puerile, takes on in places an intimacy, sometimes

touching in its tender mysticism, sometimes almost grotesque in its

crude reminder to God that after all His own glory and reputation are

bound up with His people's, and that He must not go too far in His

chastisements lest the heathen mock. Reversed, this apprehension

produced the concept of the _Chillul Hashem_, "the profanation of the

Name." Israel, in his turn, was in honour bound not to lower the

reputation of the Deity, who had chosen him out. On the contrary, he

was to promote the _Kiddush Hashem_ "the sanctification of the Name."

Thus the doctrine of election made not for arrogance but for a sense

of _Noblesse oblige_. As the "Hymn of Glory" recited at New Year says

in a more poetic sense: "His glory is on me and mine on Him." "He

loves His people," says the hymn, "and inhabits their praises."

Indeed, according to Schechter, the ancient Rabbis actually conceived

God as existing only through Israel's continuous testimony and ceasing

were Israel--_per impossibile_--to disappear. It is a mysticism not

without affinity to Mr. Wells's. A Chassidic Rabbi, quoted by Mr.

Wassilevsky, teaches in the same spirit that God and Israel, like

Father and Son, are each incomplete without the other. In another

passage of Hosea--a passage recited at the everyday winding of

phylacteries--the imagery is of wedded lovers. "I will betroth thee

unto Me for ever, Yea I will betroth thee unto Me in righteousness and

in judgment and in loving-kindness and in mercy."

But it is in the glowing, poetic soul of Jehuda Ha-Levi that this

election of Israel, like the passion for Palestine, finds its supreme

and uncompromising expression. "Israel," declares the author of the

"Cuzari" in a famous dictum, "is among the nations like the heart

among the limbs." Do not imagine he referred to the heart as a pump,

feeding the veins of the nations--Harvey was still five centuries in

the future--he meant the heart as the centre of feeling and the symbol

of the spirit. And examining the question why Israel had been thus

chosen, he declares plumply that it is as little worthy of

consideration as why the animals had not been created men. This is, of

course, the only answer. The wind of creation and inspiration bloweth

where it listeth. As Tennyson said in a similar connection:

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

And if it be so, so be it!

V

But although, as with all other manifestations of genius, Science

cannot tell us why the Jewish race was so endowed spiritually, it can

show us by parallel cases that there is nothing unique in considering

yourself a Chosen People--as indeed the accusation with which we began

reminds us. And it can show us that a nation's assignment of a mission

to itself is not a sudden growth. "Unlike any other nation," says the

learned and saintly leader of Reform Judaism, Dr. Kohler, in his

article on "Chosen People" in the _Jewish Encyclopædia_, "the Jewish

people began their career conscious of their life-purpose and

world-duty as the priests and teachers of a universal religious

truth." This is indeed a strange statement, and only on the theory

that its author was expounding the biblical standpoint, and not his

own, can it be reconciled with his general doctrine of progress and

evolution in Hebrew thought. It would seem to accept the Sinaitic

Covenant as a literal episode, and even to synchronise the Mission

with it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peoples

will, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was

other than a symbolic summary of the national genius for religion, a

sublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to other

nations must have been evolved still later. "The conception or feeling

of a mission grew up and was developed by slow degrees," says Mr.

Montefiore, and this sounds much nearer the truth. For, as I said,

history is the sole clue to the Bible--history, which according to

Bacon, is "philosophy teaching by example." And the more modern the

history is, and the nearer in time, the better we can understand it.

We have before our very eyes the moving spectacle of the newest of

nations setting herself through a President-Prophet the noblest

mission ever formulated outside the Bible. Through another great

prophet--sprung like Amos from the people--through Abraham Lincoln,

America had already swept away slavery. I do not know exactly when she

began to call herself "God's own country," but her National Anthem,

"My Country, 'tis of thee," dating from 1832, fixes the date when

America, soon after the second war with England, which ended in 1814,

consciously felt herself as a Holy Land; far as visitors like Dickens

felt her from the perfection implied in her soaring Spread-Eagle

rhetoric. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America merely for their own

freedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others.

From a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called "The Melting

Pot," with its high universal mission, first at home and now over the

world at large.

The stages of growth are still more clearly marked in English history.

That national self-consciousness which to-day gives itself the mission

of defending the liberties of mankind, and which stands in the breach

undaunted and indomitable, began with that mere insular patriotism

which finds such moving expression in the pæan of Shakespeare:

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

. . . . . . .

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

. . . . . . .

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.

This sense of itself had been born only in the thirteenth century, and

at first the growing consciousness of national power, though it soon

developed an assurance of special protection--"the favour of the love

of Heaven," wrote Milton in his "Areopagitica," "we have great

argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending

towards us"--was tempered by that humility still to be seen in the

liturgy of its Church, which ascribes its victories not to the might

of the English arm, but to the favour of God. But one hundred and

twenty-five years after Shakespeare, the land which the Elizabethan

translators of the Bible called "Our Sion," and whose mission,

according to Milton, had been to sound forth "the first tidings and

trumpet of reformation to all Europe," had sunk to the swaggering

militarism that found expression in "Rule, Britannia."

When Britain first at Heaven's command

Arose from out the azure main,

This was the charter of the land,

And guardian angels sung this strain:

Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;

Britons never will be slaves.

The nations not so blest as thee

Must in their turn to tyrants fall;

While thou shalt flourish, great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

To thee belongs the rural reign,

Thy cities shall with commerce shine:

All thine shall be the subject main,

And every shore it circles, thine.

It is the true expression of its period--a period which Sir John

Seeley in his "Expansion of England" characterizes as the period of

the struggle with France for the possession of India and the New

World: there were no less than seven wars with France, for France had

replaced Spain in that great competition of the five western maritime

States of Europe for Transatlantic trade and colonies, in which Seeley

sums up the bulk of two centuries of European history. Well may Mr.

Chesterton point to the sinking of the Armada as the date when an Old

Testament sense of being "answered in stormy oracles of air and sea"

lowered Englishmen into a Chosen People. Shakespeare saw the sea

serving England in the modest office of a moat: it was now to be the

high-road of Empire. The Armada was shattered in 1588. In 1600 the

East India Company is formed to trade all over the world. In 1606 is

founded the British colony of Virginia and in 1620 New England. It

helps us to understand the dual and conflicting energies stimulated in

the atmosphere of celestial protection, if we recall that it was in

1604 that was initiated the great Elizabethan translation of the

Bible.

In Cromwell, that typical Englishman, these two strands of impulse

are seen united. Ever conceiving himself the servant of God, he seized

Jamaica in a time of profound peace and in defiance of treaty. Was not

Catholic Spain the enemy of God? _Delenda est Carthago_ is his feeling

towards the rival Holland. Miracles attend his battle. "The Lord by

his Providence put a cloud over the Moon, thereby giving us the

opportunity to draw off those horse." Yet this elect of God ruthlessly

massacres surrendered Irish garrisons. "Sir," he writes with almost

childish naïveté, "God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon

shot." We do not need Carlyle's warning that he was not a hypocrite.

Does not Marvell, lamenting his death, record in words curiously like

Bismarck's that his deceased hero

The soldier taught that inward mail to wear

And fearing God, how they should nothing fear?

The fact is that great and masterful souls identify themselves with

the universe. And so do great and masterful nations. It is a dangerous

tendency.

At the death of Queen Anne England stood at the top of the nations.

But it was a greatness tainted by the slave-trade abroad, and poverty,

ignorance, and gin-drinking at home. We recapture the atmosphere of

"Rule, Britannia" when we recall that Thomson wrote it to the peals of

the joy-bells and the flare of the bonfires by which the mob

celebrated its forcing Walpole into a war to safeguard British trade

in the Spanish main. Seeley claims, indeed, that the growth of the

Empire was always sub-conscious or semi-conscious at its best. This is

not wholly true, for in "The Masque of Alfred" in which "Rule,

Britannia" is enshrined, Thomson displays as keen and exact a sense of

the lines of England's destiny as Seeley acquired by painful historic

excogitation. For after a vision which irresistibly recalls the

grosser Hebrew prophecies:

I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world:

All nations serve thee; every foreign flood,

Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames,

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

cries:

This new world,

Shook to its centre, trembles at her name:

And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow

The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms.

Britons, proceed, the subject deep command,

Awe with your navies every hostile land.

Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain:

They rule the balanced world who rule the main.

But you have only to remember that Seeley's famous book was written

expressly to persuade the England of 1883 _not_ to give up India and

the Colonies, to see how little "Rule, Britannia" expressed the truer

soul of Britain. The purification of England which the Methodist

movement began and which manifested itself, among other things, in

sweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for

the still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet

arose, of a genius akin to that of the Old Testament, to spiritualize

the doctrine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson is

purely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as the

visions of the Hebrew bards.

The Lord our God Most High,

He hath made the deep as dry,

He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.

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

characteristically practical.

Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience;

Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,

Make ye sure to each his own,

That he reap where he hath sown;

By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.

And it is a true picture of British activities. Even thus has England

on the whole ruled the territories into which adventure or economic

motives drew her. The very Ambassador from Germany, Prince Lichnowsky,

agrees with Rhodes that the salvation of mankind lies in British

imperialism. But note how the less spiritual factors are ignored, how

the prophet presents his people as a nation of pioneer martyrs, how

the mission, finally become conscious of itself, gilds with backward

rays the whole path of national advance, as the trail of light from

the stern of a vessel gives the illusion that it has come by a shining

road. Missions are not discovered till they are already in action. Not

unlike those archers of whom the Talmud wittily says, they first shoot

the arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe to themselves

purposes of which they were originally unconscious. First comes the

tingling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour of

retrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that that

great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland,

England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless

courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one

nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There

could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen

friend, the poet Vernède, yet even he writes:--

God grant to us the old Armada weather.

Thomson was not poet enough--nor the eighteenth century naïve

enough--to create a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that he

throws "Rule, Britannia" eight centuries back to the time of Alfred

the Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country's future

is prophetically unrolled, serves to illustrate the retrospective

habit of national missions.

The history of England is brief, and the mission evolved in her seven

centuries has not yet finally shaped itself, is indeed now shaping

itself afresh in the furnace of war. Her poets have not always

troubled with the soul of her. They have often, as Courthope

complained of Keats, turned away from her destinies to

Magic casements opening on the foam

Of faëry lands in perilous seas forlorn.

But Israel had abundant time to perfect her conception of herself.

From Moses to Ezra was over a thousand years, and the roots of the

race are placed still earlier. Can we doubt it was by a process

analogous to that we see at work in England, that Israel evolved into

a People chosen for world-service? The Covenant of Israel was

inscribed slowly in the Jewish heart: it had no more existence

elsewhere than the New Covenant which Jeremiah announced the Lord

would write there, no more objective reality than the Charter which

Britain received when "first at Heaven's command" she "rose from out

the azure main," or than that _Contrat Social_ by which Rousseau

expressed the rights of the individual in society. But to say this is

not to make the mission false. Ibsen might label these vitalizing

impulses "Life-illusions," but the criteria of objective truth do not

apply to volitional verities. National missions become false only when

nations are false to them. Nor does the gradualness of their evolution

rob them of their mystery. _Hamlet_ is not less inspired because

Shakespeare began as a writer of pothooks and hangers.

If it is suggested that to explain the Bible by men and nations under

its spell is to reason in a circle, the answer is that the biblical

vocabulary merely provides a medium of expression for a universal

tendency. Claudian, addressing the Emperor Theodosius, wrote:--

O nimium dilecte deo, cui militat æther.

The Egyptian god Ammon, in the great battle epic of Rameses II,

assured the monarch:--

Lo, I am with thee, my son; fear not, Ramessu Miammon!

Ra, thy father, is with thee, his hand shall uphold thee in danger,

More am I worth unto thee than thousands and thousands of soldiers.

The preamble to the modern Japanese Constitution declares it to be "in

pursuance of a great policy co-extensive with the Heavens and the

Earth."