be that the former seizes on every available means for producing
religious emotion _through the senses_; the latter turns away from such
means with intense mistrust, and limits itself to appeals _through the
mind_. Dark and solemn churches like that at Assisi decorated by Giotto
(which the friar who showed it told me was the “best place in the whole
world for prayer”), gorgeous altars, splendid functions, pictures,
music, incense,—all these are to the Catholic and High Churchman
veritable “means of grace”; _i.e._, they call out in them emotions which
either are religious or they think lead to religion. Long Prayers,
Hymns, Bible-readings, and preachings,—these, on the other hand, are the
Evangelicals’ means of grace, and they produce in them emotions
distinctly religious. We must, I think, treat these differences as
matters of spiritual _taste_, concerning which it is proverbially idle
to dispute. Both have their advantages, and both their great perils: the
Catholic method has the peril of lapping the soul in a fool’s paradise
of fancied piety, which is only sensuous excitement; the Puritan method
has that of creating the hysteria of a Revival. In each case it is the
contagion of _the emotion of a multitude_ which creates the danger.
Solitary religious emotion, either produced by the glory and majesty of
Nature or by lonely prayer and communings with God, can lead to no evil;
nay, is the climax of purest joy vouchsafed to man. Not misguided are
those who enter into their chambers and shut the door “to pray to Him
who sees in secret,” or who go up into the hills and woods
“To seek
That Being in whose honor shrines are weak,
Upreared by human hands.”
The converse of the emotions of Awe and Reverence—namely, the tendency
to jest and ridicule—are supposed by some to be dangerous enemies to
religion. I do not believe they are so. I think a genuine sense of humor
and a keen eye for the ludicrous is a most precious protection against
absurdities and excesses. Like Tenderness and Strength, the sense of the
Sublime and of the Ridiculous are complementary to each other, and exist
only in perfection together in the same character. It is the man who
cannot laugh who never weeps.
Finally, we reach the point where the religious emotions, produced
either alone or by contagion, effect the greatest of spiritual miracles:
that “conversion” or revulsion of the soul which ancient India, no less
than Christendom, likened to a New or Second Birth. It would appear
that, when this mysterious change does not take place by the solitary
work of the Divine on the human spirit, it does so by the attractive
power of another human soul, which has itself already undergone the
great transformation. It is the _living_ Saint who conveys spiritual
_life_. He need not be a very great or far advanced soul in the
spiritual realm. Many a simple person with no exceptional gifts has
“turned to the wisdom of the just” the hearts of strong men, whom the
most eloquent and thoughtful of preachers have failed to move by a hair.
But the greater the saint, the greater naturally must be his power. It
was the contagion of Divine Love, caught from him who felt it most of
all the sons of men, which moved the little band in the upper chamber of
Jerusalem—who moved the world.
It is worthy of notice that when a man so powerfully influences another
as to “convert” him in the true sense, _i.e._ to bring him to the higher
spiritual life, it very often happens that at the same time he
“converts” him in the lower sense, to the doctrines of the special
Church to which he himself belongs. The man has received the impulse of
religion from that particular direction. It has come to him colored by
the hues of his friend’s piety, and he accepts it, doctrines and all, as
he finds it. The matter has been one of emotional contagion, not of
critical argument on either side.
It is impossible to form the faintest estimate of the good—the highest
kind of good—which a single devout soul may accomplish in a lifetime by
spreading the holy contagion of the Love of God in widening circles
around it. But just as far as the influence of such men is a cause for
thankfulness, so great would be the calamity of a time, if such should
ever arrive, when there should be a dearth of saints in the world, and
the fire on the altar should die down. A Glacial Period of Religion
would kill many of the sweetest flowers in human nature; and woe to the
land where (as it would seem is almost the present case in France at
this moment) the priceless tradition of Prayer is being lost, or only
maintained in fatal connection with outworn superstitions.
To resume the subject of this paper. We have seen that the Emotions,
which are the chief springs of human conduct, may either be produced by
their natural stimuli or conveyed by contagion from other minds, but
that they can neither be _commanded_ nor _taught_. If we desire to
convey good and noble emotions to our fellow-creatures, the only means
whereby we can effect that end is by filling our own hearts with them
till they overflow into the hearts of others. Here lies the great truth
which the preachers of Altruism persistently overlook. It is better to
_be_ good than to _do_ good. We can benefit our kind in no way so much
as by being ourselves pure and upright and noble-minded. We can never
_teach_ Religion to such purpose as we can _live_ it.
It was my privilege to know a woman who for more than twenty years was
chained by a cruel malady to what Heine called a “mattress grave.”
Little or nothing was it possible for her to do for any one in the way
of ordinary service. Her many schemes of usefulness and beneficence were
all stopped. Yet, merely by attaining to the lofty heights of spiritual
life and knowledge, that suffering woman helped and lifted up the hearts
of all who came around her, and did more real good, and of the highest
kind, than half the preachers and philanthropists in the land. Even now,
when her beautiful soul has been released at last from its earthly cage,
it still lifts many who knew her to the love of God and Duty to remember
what she was, and to the faith in immortality to think what now she must
be, within the golden gates.
ESSAY III.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM.
When the new “Science of Religions” has been further developed, it will
probably be recognized that the character of each is determined, not
only by its own proper dogmas, but by those of the religion which it has
superseded. Men do not, as they often imagine, tear up an old faith by
the roots and plant a new one on the same ground. They only cut across
the old and graft the new on its stem. Thus it comes to pass, for
example, that much of the sap of Roman Paganism runs through the pores
of Latin Christianity, and much of that of Odin worship through those of
Teuton and Scandinavian Protestantism. Still more certainly does the
faith held by an individual man in his earlier years dye his mind with
its peculiar color, so that no subsequent conversion ever wholly
obliterates it, but makes him like a frescoed wall on which yellow has
been painted over blue, leaving as the result—green. The tint of
Anglican piety may be discerned even beneath a pervert Cardinal’s
scarlet robe. A Romish acolyte, transformed into the most brilliant of
sceptical essayists, still boasts that the ecclesiastical set of his
brain enables him “alone in his century” to understand Christ and Saint
Francis.[13] A Jew, baptized and become Prime Minister of England, wrote
novels and made history altogether in the vein of the author of the Book
of Esther. Beneath the wolf’s clothing of the whole pack of modern
Secularists, Agnostics, and Atheists, friction reveals (for the present
generation, at all events) a flock of harmless Christian sheep.
For this reason hasty efforts to fuse religious bodies which happen to
manifest tendencies to doctrinal agreement seem predestined to failure.
Much else besides mere readiness to pronounce similar symbols of faith
is needed to gather men permanently into one temple. Amalgamation
attempted prematurely can only result in accentuating those diversities
of sentiment which have stronger power to dissever than any intellectual
affinities have charms to unite. Ecclesiastical schisms are infinitely
easier to effect than ecclesiastical coalitions.
Nevertheless, the levelling of the fences which have for ages kept men
of different religions apart is, _per se_, a matter for such earnest
rejoicing that we may well exult at any instance of it, independently of
ulterior hopes or projects. Especially must our sympathies with those
who are thus clearing the ground be quickened when the faith to be
dis-immured is an old and venerable one, the nearest of all to our
own,—a faith whereof any important modification must be fraught with
incalculable consequences to the civilized world. The new Reform among
the Jews is emphatically such a movement,—an effort to throw down the
high and jealous walls behind which Judaism has kept itself in
seclusion. The gates of the Ghettos, which for a thousand years shut in
the Jews at night in every city in Europe, were not more rigid obstacles
to social sympathy and intercourse than have been the nation’s own
iron-bound prejudices and customs. But just as these Ghettos themselves,
so long “little provinces of Asia dropped into the map of Europe,” have
been thrown open at last by the growing enlightenment of Christian
States, so the Jewish moral walls of prejudice are being cast down by
the advanced sentiment of cultured Jews.
It is the specialty of the higher religions to unfold continually new
germs of truth, while the lower ones remain barren and become overgrown
with the rank fungi of myth and fable. I do not speak now of the results
of external influences bearing on every creed, and tending to vivify and
fructify it. Such influences have done much, undoubtedly, even for
Christianity itself, which has been stirred by all the agencies of the
Saracen conquests, the classic Renaissance, modern ethics and
metaphysics, modern critical science, and at last in our time by the
extension of the theological horizon over the broad plains of Eastern
sacred literature. I am speaking specially of the prolific power of the
richer creeds to go on, generation after generation, bringing forth
fresh, golden harvests, like the valleys of California. If we look for
an instance of the opposite barrenness, we shall find it in the worn-out
religions of China, ice-bound and arid as the desolate plains and
craters of the moon; the Tae-ping rebellion having been perhaps a
solitary development of heat caused by the impingement on them of the
orb of Christianity. If, on the other hand, we seek for a supreme
instance of fertility, we find it in the religion of Nazareth, which
seems to enjoy perpetual seed-time and perpetual harvest.
The question is one of more than historical interest: Is Judaism
likewise a religion capable of bearing fresh corn and wine and oil for
the nations? We know that both Christianity and Islam are developments
of the Jewish idea,—the Semitic development (Islam) carrying out its
monotheistic doctrine in all its rigidity, but losing somewhat on the
moral and spiritual side; the Aryan development (Christianity)
abandoning the strictly monotheistic doctrine, but carrying far forward
the moral and the spiritual part. But both these Banyan-like branches
have struck root for themselves, and their growth can no longer be
treated as derived from the trunk of Judaism. Our problem is, Can
Judaism further develop itself along its own lines? Or is it (as
generally believed) destined to permanent immobility, with no possible
future before it save gradual dismemberment and decay? Shall we best
liken it to Abraham’s oak at Mamre, whose leaf has not failed after
three thousand years of sun and storm, and when the very levin-bolt of
heaven has blasted its crown,—or to the hewn and painted mast of some
laden argosy wherein float the fortunes of Israel?
There are, it would appear, three parties now existing among modern
Jews. There is, first, the large Orthodox party, which holds by the
verbal inspiration of the Old Testament and the authority of the
Talmud.[14]
Secondly, there is the party commonly called that of Reformed Jews,
which separated about forty years ago from the Orthodox by a schism
analogous to that which cut off the Free Kirk from the Kirk of Scotland.
The _raisons d’être_ of this reform were certain questions of ritual
(the older ritual having fallen into neglect) and the relinquishment by
the reforming party of the authority of the Talmud. The progress so
effected occasioned great heart-burnings,—now happily extinguished,—and
proceeded no further than these very moderate reforms.[15]
Lastly, there is a third Jewish party, existing chiefly in Germany and
America, and numbering a few members among the younger generations in
England. For convenience’ sake, I shall distinguish it from the older
Reformed party by calling it the party of the New Reform, or of Broad
Church Jews, the analogy between its attitude towards Orthodox Judaism
and that of the late lamented Dean Stanley and his friends to the Church
of England being singularly close.
The attitude even of the Orthodox and older Reformed Jews (alike for our
present purpose) is, theoretically, not wholly unprogressive, not
necessarily purely tribal. They have admitted principles inconsistent
with stagnant tribalism. They believe that, though the _ceremonialism_
of Judaism is for Jews alone, yet the mission of Judaism is to spread
through all the nations its great central _doctrine_ of the Unity of
God. As Philipsohn (who, it is said, has since somewhat receded from his
position) observed in his Lectures so far back as 1847:—
Judaism has never declared itself to be in its specific form the
religion of all mankind, but has asserted itself to be the religion
of all mankind in and by the religious idea.... Talmudism itself
admits that he even who no longer observes the law, but who utters
as his confession of faith the words, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our
God the Eternal is One,” may be considered still to be a Jew.
_Development of the Religious Idea_, p. 256.
The saying of the Talmud, “The pious among all nations shall have a
place in the world to come,” has become a stock quotation, and has been
of the utmost value to modern Jewish orthodoxy. Thus even this most
conservative party among the Jews is not without a certain expansive
principle. It must be admitted, however, that it does little or nothing
to make that principle practically efficacious, and is content to wait
for the advent of Messiah to convert the nations by miracle without any
trouble to Jews to strive to enlighten them beforehand. Considering what
the Jews for ages have had to bear from those who vouchsafed to try to
convert _them_, we may pardon this lack of zeal for proselytism as far
from unnatural; yet the consequences have been deplorable. He who holds
a precious truth concerning eternal things, and fails to feel it to be
(as Mrs. Browning says) “like bread at sacrament,” to be passed on to
those beside him, loses his right to it, and much of his profit in it.
It is “treasure hid in a field.” The attitude is anti-social and
misanthropic of a people who practically say to their neighbors: “We
possess the most precious of all truths, of which we are the divinely
commissioned guardians and witnesses. But we do not intend to make the
smallest effort to share that truth with you, and generations of you may
go to the grave without it for all we care. We are passive witnesses,
not active apostles. By and by, the Messiah will appear, and convert all
who are alive in his time, whether they will or not; but, for the
present, Christendom is joined to idols, and we shall let it alone.” The
faith which speaks thus stands self-condemned. If a creed be not
aggressive and proselytizing, like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, it
confesses either mistrust of itself or else misanthropic indifference to
the welfare of mankind. Thus the Orthodox and the elder Reformed Jews
have tacitly pronounced their own sentence.
Turn we now from these to the new Reformation. This last is a
development of Judaism, truly _on its own lines_, but yet extending far
beyond anything contemplated by the elder bodies. To measure it aright,
we must cast back a glance over the path which Judaism traversed in
earlier times, and note how completely this new and vast stride is a
continuance of that march towards higher and wider religious truth.
From the earliest conception of Jahveh as the Tribal God,—a conception
which even Kuenen admits to be native to the race of Israel, and
untraceable to any other people,—from this conception, which plainly
assumed the existence of other and rival gods of neighboring nations, it
was an enormous step in advance to pass to the idea of One only Lord of
all the earth, whose House should be a “House of prayer for all
nations.”
Still vaster was the progress from anthropomorphic and morally imperfect
ideas of the character of the tribal God to the adoration of Isaiah’s
“High and Holy One, who inhabiteth eternity,” who dwells in the high and
holy place with the pure in heart and the contrite.
Again, there was made a bound forward by Judaism when the earlier simple
secularism and disbelief of, or indifference to, a future world vanished
before the belief in Immortality which grew up in spite of the teachings
of Antigonus and Sadok, and (after the Dispersion) never faded out again
altogether.
And finally, with the development of the Prophetic spirit, Worship
assumed more its true forms of praise, confession of sin, and
thanksgiving; and, at the fall of Jerusalem, the bloody sacrifices (long
limited to the sacred enclosure) came to an end forever amid the smoking
ruins.
These were truly great steps of progress made by Israel of old; but the
last of them left the nation to carry into its sorrowful exile an
intolerable burden of ceremonialism and dusty superstitions, whereof the
Talmud is now the lumber-room, and possessed also by an unhappy demon of
anti-social pride, which forbade it to extend to or accept from other
nations the right hand of human brotherhood. The Jews did not go out
from Jerusalem as the little band of Christian missionaries had gone,
eager to scatter their new wealth of truth among the nations, and,
though stoned and crucified by those whom they sought to bless, yet ever
after by their children’s children to be revered and canonized. The Jews
went out as misers of truth, holding their full bags of treasure hid in
their breasts. Nor in the ages following the Dispersion, while
Christianity diverged further and further from pure Theism, and through
Mariolatry and Hagiolatry sank well-nigh to polytheism and idolatry, do
we ever once hear of an attempt by any Jewish teacher, even by such a
man as Maimonides, to call back the wandering nations by proclaiming in
their ears the “schema Israel”—“THE LORD YOUR GOD THE ETERNAL IS ONE.”
Before the expulsion from Palestine, for a brief period, Judaism (as one
of its bitterest enemies has remarked) showed promise of becoming a
proselytizing creed, “when, under the influence of Greek philosophy and
other liberalizing influences, it was tending from the condition of a
tribal to that of a universal creed. But Plato succumbed to the Rabbins.
Judaism fell back for eighteen centuries into rigid tribalism, and, as
Lord Beaconsfield cynically said of it, has ever since ‘no more sought
to make converts than the House of Lords.’”[16]
At last the long pause in the progress of Judaism, considered as a
religion, seems drawing to an end; and we may hail its present advance
as the continuance of that noble march which the Jewish race began to
the music of Miriam’s timbrel.
This last step forward of Reformed Judaism consists, according to its
latest interpreter, in “the struggle now consciously and now
unconsciously maintained to emancipate the Jewish faith from every
vestige of tribalism, and to enshrine its wholly catholic doctrines in a
wholly catholic form.” This end is to be pursued through the
“DENATIONALIZATION of the Jewish religion, by setting aside all the
rules and ceremonies which do not possess an essentially religious
character or are maintained merely for the sake of the national, as
distinct from the religious, unity.”
The following are the modes in which this programme may be followed
out:—
1. Reformed Judaism abandons the Messianic hope. It neither desires nor
expects the coming of Messiah, and the resettlement of the Jews in
Palestine as a nation it regards as retrogression toward tribalism.[17]
2. It rejects the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament,
nor does it recognize the perfection and immutability of the law
contained within the Pentateuch. 3. It rejects the theory of a Divine
tradition recorded in the Mischna, and does not admit the authority of
the Talmudic laws. 4. It puts aside, as no longer binding, all the
legal, hygienic, and agrarian ordinances of the Pentateuch, together
with the laws relating to marriages and to the Levites. 5. It cuts down
the feasts and fasts to the Sabbath, the Passover, and four others. 6.
It adopts the vernacular of each country for a larger or smaller part of
the service of the synagogue, instead of retaining the whole in Hebrew.
Besides these six great changes, there are two others looming in the
distance. Reformed Judaism still regards the rite of circumcision as
binding, though several distinguished reformers (notably Geiger) have
recommended that proselytes should not be required to adopt it. Of the
change of the Sabbath day from Saturday to Sunday, I am informed that
the transference of the holy day has already been made by one synagogue
in Berlin, which holds its services on the Sunday, and by many
independent Jewish men of business; and that it is very much desired in
some other quarters. The difficulty attendant on this change obviously
is: that it would prove so favorable to the interests of Jews in a
secular sense that, if adopted, the charge of worldly motives is certain
to be brought against those who advocate it.
These, then, in brief, are the negations of Reformed Judaism. On the
positive side, it reaffirms those dogmas which are the kernel of
Judaism,—“the Unity of God; His just judgment of the world; the free
relation of every man to God; the continual progress of humanity; the
immortality of the soul; and the Divine election of Israel” (understood
to signify that the Jews, under the will of God, possess a specific
religious mission not yet entirely fulfilled). As to the observances of
Reformed Judaism, the framework of life and habit under which it
proposes to exist, “they will remain distinctively Jewish, and must not
bear the mere stamp of nineteenth century religious opinion.” The Jewish
Reformer thus, like many another Radical, is an aristocrat at heart, and
shrinks from descending to the level of a _parvenue_ faith. In my humble
judgment, he is entirely right in his decision. So long as he places the
interests of truth and honesty above all, he cannot do better than hold
fast by everything which reminds himself and the world of his pedigree
through a hundred generations of worshippers of Jehovah.
The extent to which such reformation as that now sketched prevails at
this hour among Jews is difficult to ascertain. The movement has been
going on for some time, and yet counts but a moderate number of
adherents, chiefly, as I have said, German and American Jews. Nay, what
is most unhopeful, the disease of religious indifference, that moral
phylloxera which infests the choicest spiritual vineyards, is working
its evil way among the broader-minded Jews, as it works (we know too
well) among the broader-minded Christians. To unite depth of conviction
with width of sympathy has ever been a rare achievement. “Tout
comprendre sera tout pardonner,” may be rendered, in intellectual
matters, “To find truth everywhere is to contend for it nowhere.”
There is good room to hope, however, that if some fall out of the ranks,
the Reformed party will yet possess enough energy, vigor, and cohesion
to make its influence erelong extensively felt.
It is a startling prospect which has been thus opened before us. If
anything seemed fixed in the endless flux of nations and religions, it
was the half-petrified religion of the Jew. That the stern figure which
we have beheld walking alone through the long procession of history
should come at last and take a place beside his brothers is hard to
picture. We live in a time when,
“Faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.”
Every solid body is threatened with disintegration; and the new powers
of cohesion, if such there be, have scarcely come into play. But, of all
changes fraught with momentous consequences, none could well be more
important than that of a stripping off of its tribal gaberdine by
Judaism, and the adoption of “a law fit for law universal.” The old
fable is realized. The wind and hail of persecution blew and pelted the
Jew for a thousand years, and he only drew his cloak closer around him.
The sunshine of prosperity and sympathy has shone upon him, and, lo! his
mantle is already dropping from his shoulders.