where thorns and briars spring up, it has also its pleasant and fertile spots. And even though we may have to suffer much and to endure many trials and disappointments, the eye of our faith will constantly be directed to the tranquil and happy home that awaits us beyond the grave; and, confident in the rich reward which the Lord hath laid up there for those who confide in Him and obey His word, we shall meet the summons of death with composure and hope, and we shall depart for our everlasting abode with the same confidence as the holy prophet manifested when he committed his immortal spirit into the hands of Him that gave it, exclaiming, " y "Now, O Lord, receive my soul."

קח נפשי

XXII.

"A LECTURE ON THE JEWISH PULPIT."

Delivered before the Sussex Jewish Literary Club, at the Jews' Infant School, Commercial-street, February 25, 1862.

THE subject on which I have the honour of addressing you this evening, ladies and gentlemen, is one of so vast a compass, and it embraces so many facts which should have, at least, a passing notice, that I have experienced some difficulty in compressing it within the limits of a single lecture. I discard, therefore, all preliminary matter, and only venture upon a single introductory remark that I owe to myself and you, and which I commend to your favourable construction. It is this:--That inasmuch as in the course of my lecture I shall have occasion to speak of the Jewish pulpit in reference to the discipline of the synagogue, as well as to its cumulative litany, I wish it to be clearly understood that my remarks will apply exclusively to critical and historical facts, and not in the remotest degree to any minor differences of opinion that may honestly exist between myself and many of the present audience with respect to modes of religious worship.

The pulpit may be said, with more truth than

U

satisfaction, to be quite a modern institution in the Anglo-Jewish synagogue. Whether the original cause of this is to be sought for in the spirit of exclusiveness, which, up to a very recent period, closed against the Jew the portals of all the higher schools in this country; whether it is due to an esoteric impediment or to external difficulties, it would be comparatively profitless to investigate here but I shall have occasion to shew presently that the Jewish pulpit fell into desuetude as the poetic fervour of the Peitanim, or hymn-writers, increased.

Some whom I am now addressing must be old enough to remember the time when the proposal to introduce English sermons into the Jewish house of worship was rejected by the congregational rulers as an attempt to foist on the synagogue the spurious offspring of a strange worship. " npn was the cry with which this attempt was met by hundreds of pious and well-meaning, though most unlettered, men, who imagined that a vernacular pulpit was the creation of an anti-Jewish and post-biblical age. Not one of the ameliorations so imperiously demanded by the requirements and necessities of the times, as well as by the internal condition of the synagogue itself, was more anxiously dreaded by the ignorant, as a harbinger of infidelity and apostacy, than the revival of this institution, which every man who reads and understands his Bible ought to recognise as a genuine product of Judaism. The merit of having introduced vernacular sermons into the English synagogue must be set down to the late Mr. S. Bennaton, who delivered a series of admirable

religious discourses in the synagogue of Liverpool during the years 1824 and 1825. The good work was continued at intervals by the Rev. M. N. Nathan, brother of Mr. Bennaton, during his connection with the Liverpool Hebrew Congregation. About the year 1836, the Rev. D. M. Isaacs, who had acquired a high reputation as a preacher at the synagogue of Bristol, was appointed minister to the congregation of Liverpool; and with the installation of that gentleman, the practice of weekly sermons in the synagogue may be said to have commenced in this country.

The fact is that the pulpit had been fostered in the bosom of the synagogue for many centuries before calamitous persecution had stripped the Jewish house of worship of almost every ornament, physical and spiritual, and left it well nigh a bare skeleton of a once noble and glorious form. Josephus asserts, in his controversy with Apion, that the practice of reading and expounding the Scriptures on every Sabbath-day had originated in so remote a period of Jewish history that the institution of the pulpit was held to have been sanctioned by Moses. Philo, in his celebrated work, "De Vita Mosis," maintains the same opinion, and the Talmud (Meguillah iv.) confirms the statement. The Christian pulpit, far from being an original institution, was avowedly inherited from the synagogue; and many passages found in the writings of the Evangelists, and more especially in the "Book of the Acts," bear testimony to the fact that the pulpit was in full vigour throughout the land of Judea at the time when Christianity arose.

The learned Dr. Zunz, in his incomparable work on Jewish archæology (Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden), and which I have here laid under contribution to a very considerable extent, has opened to the student of historical Judaism a path in no way inferior to that which Gibbon has laid out for the student of the history of the world from the age of the twelve Cæsars to the era of Charlemagne. Following the path of Zunz, we meet with the first notice of a public explanation of the law in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, the restorers of the Jews as a people and as worshippers of the God who revealed Himself at Sinai. Of the effects which the pulpit had wrought in the course of a century or two, and of the impulse which it had imparted to the Jewish mind, a most illustrious instance is afforded in the irresistible enthusiasm which warmed the Jewish people, and inspired them to assert the independence of their territory, the purity of the Temple, and the majesty of the law of Moses, under the guidance of the heroic Judas Maccabæus. It is reasonable to suppose that this interval between Ezra and the Maccabees had been wisely employed for the diffusion of instruction in the national literature, and for the due regulation of public worship, of which homiletic discourses formed a prominent part. This, indeed, may be confidently asserted with respect to

,(the men of the great synod) אנשי כנסת הגדולה the

who flourished about the same period, and one of whose last representatives was pow. Shemaia and Abtalion, though amongst the elder doctors of the tradition, are designated in the Talmud by the character of the "Darshanim" (expositors or