But the view which must supersede all others, is the aspect of the measure as it relates to religion. Great Britain is certainly, on the whole, a religious country: it perhaps contains more true religion than all the earth besides; but its fault is, that, though reverent in the church, it does not sufficiently carry its reverence into the course of common life. If this were done, there would be no difficulties in public opinion. It is in no superstition that we say, the only question to be asked on any doubtful course of action is, "Will it please God? Is it for the honour of God?" This is what the Scripture calls "walking with God," and describes as the essential character of virtue. But the majority of mankind add to those questions, Will it benefit myself? The statesman asks, Shall I lose power by it?—the merchant, Shall I lose profit?—the tradesman, Shall I lose custom? And this question is the master-key to the diversities of opinion on points which, to the unbiassed mind, are as clear as the sun.
Let us put the matter in a more every-day point of view. Let us suppose the question asked, Would you take for your friend a man who denied your God, who scoffed at your religion, and who declared yourself a dupe or a deceiver? Yet all this the Jew does openly by the profession of his own creed. Can you conceive it for the honour of your Redeemer, to give this man your confidence in the highest form in which it can be given by a subject? Or can you bring yourself to believe that you are doing your duty to Christ in declaring by your conduct, that to be hostile to Him makes no imaginable difference in your estimate of the character of any man?
On those points it is wholly impossible that there can be any doubt whatever. The enemy of Christ cannot, without a crime, be favoured, still less patronised and promoted, by the friend of Christ. Now, this feeling is neither prejudice nor persecution: it merely takes the words of the Jew himself; and it would not force him, by the slightest personal injury, to change the slightest of his opinions. It is merely the conduct which all who were unbiassed by gain, or unperverted by personal objects, would follow in any common act of life. To give power to the Jew, from the motives of pelf, or party, or through indifference, is criminal; and it is against this crime that we protest, and that we desire to guard our fellow Christian.
We must now rapidly pass through the leading points of the question. The Jew is a "condemned man." More than three thousand years ago, Moses, in pronouncing the future history of the people, declared that a teacher should finally be sent to their nation, like himself, a man; and mingling as such among men, to give them a law, not in clouds and thunders as at Sinai, nor written in tables of stone, nor fixed in stern ordinances, but written in the heart, and acting by the understanding: and that, if they rejected him, they should be made nationally to answer the national crime to the Almighty. Him they rejected, and the rejection has been answered by national ruin. The prophecy is before the eye of the world; the fulfilment is also before the eye of the world.
The Jew is an undone being, if there be truth in the words of inspiration. "He that believeth in the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son, shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him." (John iii. 35, 36.) What right have we to dispense with such words? The declaration is unequivocal; and if there be a compassionate allowance for the barbarian, who has no Bible and whom the gospel has never reached, what allowance can there be for the Jew, possessing the Bible and living in the sound of the gospel? But this language is not alone. We have the declaration of ruin constantly expressed or implied, "Who is a liar, but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father." (1 John ii. 22)
Are those deniers the men whom the Christian is to take into the very centre of his political favouritism? Are the brands of Scripture on the national forehead to be scorned by a people professing obedience to the Divine will? Can human conception supply a stronger proof of the reality of those brands than the condition of the Jews ever since their first fulfilment, in the fall of Jerusalem—the terrible reply to their own anathema, "His blood be on us, and on our children."
What is the state of the Jew himself with respect to sacred things? Nothing but ignorance can speak of the religion of the Jew. So far as belongs to worship, he has none. Sacrifice, the solemnisation of the three great festivals, the whole ceremonial of the temple, were essential to Judaism. The Jew cannot perform a single public ceremonial of his religion. Sacrifice was supremely essential for nearly the atonement of every fault of man; but it could be offered only in the Temple. The Temple is gone. What now becomes of his atonement?
A weak attempt is made to answer this tremendous question, by referring to the condition of the Jews in Babylon. But what comparison can exist between a captivity prophetically limited to years not exceeding a single life, passed under the protection of kings, and under the guardianship of the most illustrious man of Asia, the prophet Daniel, cheered by prophecy and miracle, and certain of return, and the eighteen hundred years' banishment of the Jew? What comparison between the temporary suspension of the national worship, and the undefined and hopeless duration which seems to lie before the Jewish exile; and which, when it shall close at last, will extinguish his Judiasm, will show him his folly only by stripping the superstition of the Rabbi and the Talmud from his eyes, and will awake him at once to the extent of his error, to the exercise of his understanding, and to the worship of Christianity?
After considerations of this order, all others must be almost trivial. But the common declamation on the natural right of the Jew to be represented in Parliament is verbiage. But the Jew is actually represented, as much as a multitude of other interests of superior importance are represented. Are the fifteen thousand clergy of the Church of England (a body worth all the Jews on the globe) personally represented? Are the millions of England under twenty-one represented? One might thus go through the great industrious classes of England, and find that, out of twenty millions, there are not one million electors. And what claim have a class—who come to this country only to make money, and who make nothing but money, and who, if they could make more money anywhere else on the earth, would go there to-morrow—to an equality of right with the manly, honest, and attached son of England, every day of whose life adds something to the comfort or the credit of the community?
The whole and sole claim of the Jew is, that some of his party are rich. How they have made their riches, or how they spend them, is beneath us to inquire. But what are their national evidences, even of wealth, it might be difficult to discover. They exhibit no fruits here, nor anywhere. It has been often asked, with genuine astonishment, what signs of national liberality have ever been given by Jewish wealth in the world? What contribution does it make, or has it ever made, to the arts that decorate life, to the literature that enlightens it, or to those bold and commanding services by which nations are raised or restored? Where are the picture galleries, or the great libraries, the great institutions, erected by the wealth of the Jew? As to the genius which endows mankind, for generations to come, with noble inventions, or leaves its name behind in a track of glory to posterity, who ever heard of it among the Jews? Shopkeepers of London have planted its vicinity with great establishments, castles of charity, magnificent monuments of practical religion, to which all the works of Jewish bounty are molehills. The Jews have an hospital and a few schools,—and there the efflux of liberality stops, the stream stagnates, the river becomes a pond, and the pond dries away.