make the life stronger, sweeter, purer, nobler? Does it run through the whole society like a cleansing flame, burning up that which is mean and base and selfish and impure ? If it stands this test, it is no heresy. There is but one church of the true child of God, and unfaithfulness is the only infidelity. I am so convinced that there is no error more fatal than the notion that correct belief or church membership is of any value whatever, in comparison with that righteousness of life which is the be-all and end-all of true religion, that I say plainly-and, if I could find words to say it yet more plainly, I would say it yet more plainly—I would rather that any man should be a Romanist or a Dissenter or a Buddhist or a Mohammedan, so that he were a holy and godly man, than ten times over a member of the most catholic church that ever existed, and be a sly intriguer, or a rancorous slanderer, or an unclean liver, or a professed liar, or, in any one form of conscious wickedness, a hypocrite and a bad man. F. W. FARRAR. Why was the Ark of the Covenant overlaid with pure gold, both outside and inside? To teach that he only is a worthy Master of the Law who is as true and as pure in his heart as he would appear before And why was the coffin of Joseph carried by the side of the Ark? To testify that he who slept in the one fulfilled the whole law contained in the other. -The Pharisees. men. XII. The Healing Hand of God. A voice was heard upon the high places, weeping, and supplications of the children of Israel; for they have perverted their way and they have forgotten the Lord, their God. Return, ye backsliding children, I will heal your backslidings! Behold, we come unto Thee, for Thou art the Lord, our God.-Jeremiah iii. 21, 22. ME may compare the life of Israel to the life of a healthy man. At first he was young, and advanced from one thing to another; then he arrived at middle age and remained for a long time in the best condition; then diseases came upon him and maladies, and his health was undone and his visage marred, and it is as if he had never been healthy at all, and it is almost as if naught were left to him of his former appearance; for all is changed; he is, for a time, as if he had never been healthy at all, and it is almost as if nought were left to him of his former appearance; for, all is changed, and he is, for a time, despaired of. After that, however, his condition improves, and the body begins to recover perceptibly; it heals little by little; he returns to his health, and it is as if he had never been sick at all. So God knew beforehand Israel's firmness in obedience, but describes the corruptions of our condition between the two periods, and threatens Israel with every possible calamity and misfortune; but He declares at the end, that in spite of their corruption and of His punishing them, He would not hate them nor cast them off, and that God's anger was but chastisement for disobedience. For Scripture calls calamity correction in the wellknown verse: "As a man chasteneth his son, even so does the Lord, thy God, chasten thee." And God, the exalted One, proclaimed, in this sense, to his first apostle: "Yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them to destroy them." MOSES MAIMONIDES. XIII. MEX Unbroken in Spirit. Israel shall be saved in the Lord with an enduring salvation; ye shall not be ashamed or confounded at any time-Isaiah xlv. 17. Wisdom strengtheneth a man more than ten mighty men that are in a city-Ecclesiastes vii. 19. EXT to the selection that has been in operation for centuries, it is, in my opinion, the antiquity and the continuity of their civilization that throws some light upon the Jews, as well as upon the place they occupy in our midst. They were here before us; they are our elders. Their children were taught to read from the scrolls of the Tora before our Latin alphabet had reached its final form, long before Cyrillus and Methodius had given writing to the Slavs, and before the Runic characters were known to the Germans of the North. As compared with the Jews, we are young, we are new-comers; in the matter of civilization they are far ahead of us. It was in vain that we locked them up for several hundred years behind the walls of the Ghetto; no sooner were their prison gates unbarred than they easily caught up with us, even on those paths which we had opened up without their aid. ANATOLE LEROY BEAULIEU. OCKS and jeers were all its portion, m Death assailed it in ten thousand forms, Yet this people never faltered; Hope, its beacon, led it through all storms. XIV. The Torch of Science. And when the king sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, he shall write him a copy of this Law in a book, out of that which is before the Priests the Levites, and it shall be with him and he shall read therein all the days of his life. 18, 19. Get wisdom, get knowledge. -Deut. xvii. Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee; love her and she shall keep thee.-Proverbs iv. 5, 6. LEARNING was for two thousand years the sole claim to distinction recognized by Israel. To the scholar were accorded all the honors. "The scholar," says the Talmud, "takes precedence over the king; the learned bastard over the ignorant high-priest." What a contrast to this is afforded by our Western barbarians, the Franks, the Goths, and the Lombards. Israel remained faithful to this precept throughout all her humiliations. Whenever, in Christian or Moslem lands, a hostile hand closed her schools, the rabbis crossed the seas to reopen their academies in a distant country. Like the legendary wandering Jew, the flickering torch of Jewish science thus passed from East to West, from North to South, changing every two or three hundred years from one country to another. Whenever a royal edict commanded them to leave, within three months, the country in which their fathers had been buried and their sons had been born, the treasure which the Jews were most anxious to carry away with them was their books. Among all the auto-da-fès which the daughter of Zion has had to witness, none has cost her such bitter tears as those flames which, during the Middle Ages, greedily consumed the scrolls of the Talmud. ANATOLE LEROY BEAULIEU. 'HE light pours down from heaven And enters where it may; The eyes of all earth's children So let the mind's true sunshine |