There can be no doubt that Zionism is a strong protest against these weaklings, and that the coming century will witness the Jews divided into two camps not necessarily hostile to each other, the Zionists and the Non-Zionists—those who plead for a conservation of the old energy and the old ideals, and those who look forward to the disintegration of Judaism and its gradual passing away into other forces. That Judaism can only conserve its force if that force is attached to a racial and national basis is seen clearly in the fact that just those Jews in Germany who have been most loudly clamorous against the Zionists propose to have now what they call a German “Judentag,” which can certainly mean nothing unless it become Zionist in its tendency.
Confident in this hope, we of the House of Israel look calmly into the future. The message of the prophet of old is full of meaning for us: “Thus saith the Lord God: behold I, even I, will both search my sheep and seek them out, as a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his flock which is scattered, and I will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day.” We can echo the sentiments expressed by a Christian Zionist, George Eliot, many years ago: “Revive the organic centre; let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories.”
Richard J. H. Gottheil.
FREE-THOUGHT
The history of religion during the past century may be described as the sequel of that dissolution of the mediæval faith which commenced at the Reformation. The vast process of disintegration proceeds by degrees, is varied by reactionary effort, and gives birth to new theories in its course. In our day the completion of the process and a new departure seem to be at hand. A sharp line cannot be drawn at the beginning of the last century, the leaders of religious thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries having been to a great extent the leaders, and their works the text-books, of the nineteenth.
At the Reformation Protestantism threw off the yoke of Pope and priest, priestly control over conscience through the confessional, priestly absolution for sin, and belief in the magical power of the priest as consecrator of the Host, besides the worship of the Virgin and the saints, purgatory, relics, pilgrimages, and other incidents of the mediæval system. Ostensibly, Protestantism was founded on freedom of conscience and the right of private judgment. In reality, it retained Church authority over conscience in the shape of dogmatic creeds and ordination tests. It besides enforced belief in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, by which the exercise of private judgment was narrowly confined. Not for some time did it even renounce persecution. In grimly Calvinistic Scotland a boy was hanged for impugning the doctrine of the Trinity at the end of the seventeenth century. The Anglican Church, suspended by the will of the Tudor sovereigns between Catholicism and Protestantism, oscillated from side to side, producing by one of its oscillations the great civil war. It burned heretics in the reign of James I. All the Protestant Churches except the Baptists, who at first were objects of persecution, fell under the dominion of the state, which repaid them for their submission and support by endowments, temporal privileges, and persecution of dissent.
Though Protestantism produced a multitude of sects, especially in England at the time of the Commonwealth, hardly any of them were free-thinking or sceptical; those of any importance, at all events, were in some sense dogmatic and were anchored to the inspiration of the Bible. Nor is it easy to convict Hobbes, bugbear of the orthodox as he was, of scepticism or even of heterodoxy. The expression of heterodox opinions, indeed, would have been a violation of his own principle, which makes religion absolutely an affair of the state, to be regulated by a despotic government, and confines liberty to the recesses of thought. It is true that in making religion a political institution, variable at a despot’s will, he covertly denied that it was divine.
Under the Restoration religious thought and controversy slept. The nation was weary of those subjects. The liberty for which men then struggled was political, though with political liberty was bound up religious toleration, which achieved a partial triumph under William III.