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]]