only a Jewish following, but considerable constructive influence, under the auspices of the Synagogue. A Heine and a Boerne felt it necessary to profess Christianity in order to become full citizens of the republic of letters; and Auerbach and a Franzos remained, a Fulda and a Schnitzler remain Jews, largely because the moral atmosphere has improved. "Ihe same man who, under the exasperating wrongs of Russian despotism, has become a frenzied nihilist, even lends himself as tool for political assassination, may, under benign government, have become the most placid and law-abiding of citizens. It is, conversely, a fact witnessed in our own country, in more than one conspicuous instance, that coreligionists of ours who have come to these shores filled with the bitterest hostility to all existing systems of social organization have, in the course of years, taken service as parts of that system; at the same time their whole attitude towards the pillars of the commonwealth, among them re- lieıon. has undereone a radical change.
To me what a man calls his religious convictions is comparatively unimportant as against his strong or weak sense of solidarity with his people. If you force me to choose between the pious Jew (there are such), who prefers non-Jewish intercourse for his children, and between the Yom Kippur-frolicker whose family associations are altogether Jewish, I shall reluctantly have to confess that, in the life of the diaspora, Judaism has far more of a future with the latter. 'I’he truths, the history, the traditions of Judaism will not be destroyed by any amount of passing neglect; but that which is fundamental to them, their banner-bearers, are in constant danger of being assimilated out of existence by the rapid disintegrations of unhindered educational, vocational, social intercourse.
It is stupidly idle to declaim dogmatically that the Jew is a religious people, that religion is his one bond, his reason-d’etre, his sphere of mastery, his one future, destiny, mission. T'he shallow error to which so narrow and pedantic an emphasis is bound to lead, and in instances, has led, is that of refusing to see how many by-ways and winding paths lead to religion, until it has actually happened at one rabbinical convention, difhcult as it may seem to believe, that it was deemed insufficient for organizations of Jewish college-men to be animated by the Jewish spirit; to obtain the sanction of our modern Reform bigots they had to be banded together, like some brotherhood of monks, purely for religious ends! How unreal, how dishonest an insistence, in the face of well-known facts! But it is one bane of stubborn, rote- learned cant that it is unaware of its own hollowness.
For my part, I am willing to have patience with a much-tried people which can evolve only slowly into its permanent self out of all the whirlpools of upheaval after upheaval through which it is passing. Just as the Reform Jew has every prospect of passing out of his present intolerable phase of unreal professions, of pale non-dlescriptness, of heated pretension to religious Messiahship by the verv side of dejudaized homes, declamatory forms of worship, the callow, flavorless, unedifying intellectual shoddism of the “lecture,” just as Reform Judaism is bound to emerge out of these adolescent ailments once we shall have sturdy Jewishness and fervid religiousness to take the place of ranting party cries, oratorical pyrotechnies and vulgar “Strebertum,” even so
may we trust the pervert from Russian and Roumanian purgatories and the occidental drifter along swift currents of assimilation to take their rightful places along constructive lines of spiritual unfoldment.
Let us not forget that other movements, besides Zionism, have started out by cutting loose from religious leading-strings under the erroneous impression that such emancipation was serving the broader spirit of pure humanity. There was a time when the Order of Bnai Brith carefully eschewed all entanglements with Jewish religious interests; there was a time when our Young Men’s Hebrew Associations fought shy of religious work of any kind. Settlement work, such as that of the Educational Alliance in New York, was bare of religious features, even eliminating the Jewish name; in our hospital work and similar charity there was a snobbish, toadying stress laid on the boast of unsectarianism ; to accommodate the Kosher practices of the orthodox was equivalent, at that time, to induleing antiquated superstitions.
We have grown, in the last two decades, into a more rational appraisement of impalpable religious values. The Bnai Brith, from having flirted wth Ethical Culture, has found an ally in the synagogue and a congenial soil in the Jewish spirit; our charities and benevolences, especially those of the educational order, have discovered religion to be something of a cement in family life, in character-building. in social morals. Judaism, from having stood for mere petty factional quarrel between orthodox, conservative and reform, is seen as a religious, moral and social factor, as a bond between hearts, a moulder of lives and homes, a discipline that has given rise to a type of spiritual culture which deserves niot only to live, but to put forth vivid blossoms of fresh fragrance in the sunlight of freedom, in place of the pale, sweet, fragile window growths of Ghetto dungeons.
These, too, of course, will, to the men of abiding faith and indwelling religiousness, be the guiding principles when dealing with inescapable phenomena of this kind even in resurrected Zion. The atheist, the scoffer, the sceptic and ceynic, the decadent are bound to appear in any nascent civilization to which the present stage of human progress stands godfather. T'he question may arise, in fact it has been asked by those who are sceptical of the Jew’s capacities for self-government: Will there be a state church in a modern Zion? It is a question to which only one answer is conceivable; it is a free unfoldment for which we are asking; we must have confidence in the strength of the national genius to evolve into its true self, when left unhindered to follow its native promptings. Religion is strongest and most wholesome wherever it is freest from all outward coercion; a state- church is bound to breed obsequiousness, lip-service, wire-pulling among its followers, a spirit of resentment and animosity against religion itself among the victims of arbitrary discrimination. On the historical soil of the world’s mother-faith, surrounded by those reminiscences of our past which the world united with us in revering, we need have no fear of atheist or scoffer, of sceptic and eynic: as constituents of a full-grown nation their feeble opposition is robbed of its sting.
It is while we are members of occidental civilizations with which we refuse to merge by intermarriage, that the patent inconsistency of our Sabbath-breaking, of our godless homes, of our ignorance of the Jewish past, our re-