“That great world of light which lies
Behind all human destinies.”
Jews have, it would appear, essentially the esprit positif. They are content to let the impenetrable veil hang between their eyes and the future world,—that veil which the Aryan soul strives impatiently, age after age, to tear away, or on which it throws a thousand phantasms from the magic-lanthorn of fancy. Millions of Christians have lived with their “treasures” truly placed in that world where moth and rust do not corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. Especially have the bereaved among us dwelt on earth with their hearts already in heaven where their beloved ones await them. To too great an extent, no doubt, has this “other-worldliness” been carried, especially among ascetics; but, on the whole, the firm anchorage of Christian souls beyond the tomb has been the source of infinite comfort and infinite elevation. Of this sort of projection of the spirit into the darkness, this rocket-throwing of ropes of faith over the deeps of destruction, whereby the mourner’s shipwrecked soul is saved and reinstated, the Jewish consciousness seems yet scarcely cognizant. Perhaps these days of pessimism and mental fog are not those wherein any one is likely to find his faith in immortality quickened. As Dr. Johnson complained that he was “injured” by every man who did not believe all that he believed, so each of us finds his hope of another life chilled by the doubts which, like icebergs, float in the sea of thought we are traversing. But, for those Jews who thoroughly accept the dogma of immortality, it would surely be both a happiness and a source of moral elevation to give to such a stupendous fact its place in the perspective of existence. There is infinite difference between the molelike vision which sees nothing beyond the grassroots and the worms of earth, though dimly aware of a world of sunlight above, and the eagle glance which can measure alike things near and afar; between the man who counts his beloved dead as lost to him because he beholds and hears and touches them no more, and the man who can say calmly amid his sorrow,—
“Take them, thou great Eternity!
Our little life is but a gust,
Which bends the branches of thy tree,
And trails its blossoms in the dust.”
Turning now from the results on Judaism itself and on Christianity at large of a great Jewish Reformation, we may indulge in some reflections on the possible bearings of such an event on that not inconsiderable number of persons who, all over Europe, are hanging loosely upon or dropping silently away from the Christian Churches. I am not speaking of those who become Atheists or Agnostics and renounce all interest in religion, but of those who, like Robert Elsmere, pass into phases of belief which may be broadly classed under the head of Theism. These persons believe still in God and in the life to come, and hold tenaciously by the moral and spiritual part of Christianity, perhaps sometimes feeling its beauty and truth more vividly than some orthodox Christians who deem the startling, miraculous, and “apocalyptic” part to constitute the essence of their faith. But this “apocalyptic part,” and all which Dr. Martineau has called the “Messianic mythology,” they have abandoned. Of the number of these persons, it is hard to form an estimate. Some believe that the Churches are all honeycombed by them, and that a panic would follow could a census of England be taken in a Palace of Truth. Not a few in the beginning and middle of this century quitted their old folds, and under the names of “Unitarians,” “Free Christians,” and “Theists” have thenceforth stood confessedly apart.[[24]] But of late years the disposition to make any external schism has apparently died away. The instinct, once universal, to build a new nest for each brood of faith seems perishing among us. The Church-forming spirit, so vigorous of old in Christianity and in Buddhism, is visibly failing, and making way for new phases of development, of which the Salvation Army may possibly afford us a sample. Among cultivated people subtle discrimination of differences and fastidiousness as regards questions of taste are indefinitely stronger than that desire for a common worship which, in the breasts of our forefathers, who “rolled the psalm to wintry skies,” and dared death merely to pray together, must have mounted to a passion. Englishmen generally still cling to public worship, but it is chiefly where an ancient liturgy supplies by old and holy words a dreamy music of devotion, into which each feels at liberty to weave his own thoughts. Wherever the demand is made for prayers which shall definitely express the faith and aspirations of the modern-minded worshipper, there the subtleties and the fastidiousness come into play, and, instead of being drawn together, men sorrowfully discover that they are made conscious by common worship of a hundred discrepancies of opinion, a thousand disharmonies of taste and feeling. In all things, we men and women of the modern Athens are not “too superstitious,” but too critical; and in religion, which necessarily touches us most vitally, our critical spirit threatens to paralyze us with shyness. The typical English gentleman and lady of to-day are at the opposite pole of sentiment in this respect from the Arab who kneels on his carpet on the crowded deck for his evening orison, or from the Italian contadina who tells her beads before the wayside Madonna. Doubtless, here is one reason among many why such multitudes remain without any definite place in the religions of the land. They hang languidly about the old hive, feebly humming now and then, but feeling no impulse to swarm, and finding no queen-spirit to lead them to another home where they might build their proper cells and make their own honey.
But, whether embodied in any religious sect or Church, or hanging loosely upon one, the persons of whom we have been speaking, as believers in God and in the spiritual, but not the apocalyptic side of Christianity,—Christian Theists, as we may best call them,—are of course nearer in a theological point of view than any others to those Reformed Jews whom we may call Jewish Theists. The intellectual creeds of each, in fact, might, without much concession on either side, be reduced to identical formulæ. Now, Christian Theists have hitherto wanted a rallying point, and have been taunted with the lack of any historic basis for their religion. Why (it will be asked by many) should not this Reformed Judaism afford such a rallying point, and the old rocky foundations laid by Moses support a common temple of Christian and Jewish Theism?
It may prove that such a consummation may be among the happy reunitings and reconstructions of the far future. But for the present hour, and for the reasons I have given in the beginning of this paper, I do not believe it can be near at hand. I am also quite sure that it would be the extreme of unwisdom to hamper and disturb the progress of Reformed Judaism along its own lines by any hasty efforts at amalgamation with outsiders, who would bring with them another order of religious habits and endless divergencies of opinion.