Book 3 — APPENDIX

ANNOTATIONS

In its deepest import, “the tradition is simply a wonderful picture of a people—a people forever suffering and yet undying; forever doomed to wander; without a home or any fixed abiding-place; safe nowhere, and yet immortal; trampled and beaten; robbed and persecuted, and yet, strangely, living and flourishing in spite of all. The most vigorous, virile, and healthful people under the sun; the bravest and most enduring in battle or siege; the most patriotic and loyal of all peoples, they stedfastly, through all their wanderings and sorrows, cling to a land which is but a memory or a dream.”

In this story, Dr. Croly adds to the typical traditions, peculiar features of his own. Having such a hold on popular imagination, the Wandering Jew has figured very largely in fiction, particularly in the works of A. W. Schlegel, Klingemann, Béranger, Eugene Sue, Hans Christian Andersen, and others.

Josephus tells also of another Eleazar, who, at the time when the Jews took the fortress of Masada by treachery, was the governor of the Temple. He was the son of Ananias, the High Priest, and was a very bold youth. He “persuaded those that officiated in the divine service to receive no gift or sacrifice from any foreigner. And this,” adds Josephus, “was the true beginning of our war with the Romans; for they rejected the sacrifice of Cæsar on this account.”

The real leader in this early Jewish war was, however, Flavius Josephus, the historian. After the destruction of the army of Cestius Gallus in A.D. 66, the patriots precipitated a revolution, and Josephus was sent to organize the defense of Galilee. He led in the desperate struggle against Vespasian, but fell into the hands of the Romans after the fall of the stronghold of Jotapata and the subsequent massacre there. He saved himself by predicting the future elevation of Vespasian to the imperial throne. He was present in the Roman army at the destruction of Jerusalem, and accompanied Titus to Rome, where he resided for the rest of his life. He was a great leader, and Salathiel in his exploits often seems to personate him.

“This name was derived from one ‘Christus,’ who was executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate; and this accursed superstition, for a moment repressed, broke forth again, not only through Judea, the source of evil, but even through the city, whither all things outrageous and shameful flow together and find many adherents. Accordingly those were first arrested who confessed, afterward a vast number upon their information, who were convicted, not so much on the charge of causing the fire, as for their hatred to the human race. To their execution there were added such mockeries as that they were wrapped in the skins of wild beasts and torn in pieces by dogs, or crucified, or set on fire and burnt, when daylight ended, as torches by night. Nero lent his own gardens for the spectacle, and gave a chariot race, at which he mingled freely with the multitude in the garb of a driver or mounted on his chariot. As the result of all, a feeling of compassion arose for the sufferers, tho guilty and deserving of condign punishment, on the ground that they were destroyed not for the common good, but to gratify the cruelty of one man.”

“There was a rock not small in circumference, and very high. It was encompassed with valleys of such vast depth downward that the eye could not reach their bottoms; they were abrupt, and such as no animal could walk upon, excepting at two places of the rock, where it subsides, in order to afford a passage for ascent, tho not without difficulty. Now, of the ways that lead to it, one is that from the Lake Asphaltitis, toward the sun-rising, and another on the west, where the ascent is easier; the one of these ways called the Serpent, as resembling that animal in its narrowness and its perpetual windings; for it is broken off at the prominent precipice of the rock, and returns frequently into itself, and lengthening again by little and little, hath much ado to proceed forward; and he that would walk along it must first go on one leg, and then on the other; there is also nothing but destruction in case your feet slip; for on each side there is a vastly deep chasm and precipice, sufficient to quell the courage of everybody by the terror it infuses into the mind. When, therefore, a man had gone along this way for thirty furlongs, the rest is the top of the hill, not ending at a small point, but is no other than a plain upon the highest part of the mountain. Upon this top of the hill, Jonathan, the High Priest, first of all built a fortress and called it Masada; after which the rebuilding of this place employed the care of King Herod to a great degree.”

“Moreover, he built a palace therein at the western ascent; it was within and beneath the walls of the citadel, but inclined to its north side. Now the wall of this palace was very high and strong, and had at its four corners towers sixty cubits high. The furniture, also, of the edifices, and of the cloisters, and of the baths, was of great variety and was very costly; and these buildings were supported by pillars of single stones on every side; the walls also, and the floors of the edifices were paved with stones of several colors.… As for the furniture that was within this fortress, it was still more wonderful, on account of its splendor and long continuance.… There was also found here a large quantity of all sorts of weapons of war, which had been treasured up by that king, and were sufficient for ten thousand men; there were cast-iron, and brass, and tin: which show that he had taken much pains to have all things here ready for the greatest occasions; for the report goes, how Herod thus prepared this fortress on his own account, as a refuge against two kinds of danger: the one for fear of the multitude of the Jews, lest they should depose him, and restore their former kings to the government; the other danger was greater and more terrible, which arose from Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, who did not conceal her intentions, but spake often to Antony, and desired him to cut off Herod, and entreated him to bestow the kingdom of Judea upon her. And certainly it is a great wonder that Antony did never comply with her commands in this point, as he was so miserably enslaved to his passion for her; nor should any one have been surprised if she had been gratified in such her request. So the fear of these dangers made Herod rebuild Masada, and thereby leave it for the finishing stroke of the Romans in this Jewish war.”

“Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria, set his forces in motion, with the forces of Agrippa, who had now openly taken the Roman side, and other allies, added to his Roman legions. He advanced upon Jerusalem through the pass of Bethhoron, at the season of the Feast of Tabernacles, A.D. 66, with an army of 25,000 men. Regardless alike of the feast and of the Sabbath, the Jews rushed out to meet the enemy on the spot consecrated by the victories of Joshua and Judas Maccabeus; crushed the Roman van with the slaughter of more than 500 men, and with a loss of only 22. A charge of light troops on the Jewish rear saved the army of Cestius from destruction, and gave him time to entrench his camp, and the Jews were obliged to retire to Jerusalem.” Cestius then advanced and encamped at Scopus, a mile to the north of the city. After five days of irregular attacks, he advanced against the northern wall of the Temple and began the work of mining; but, notwithstanding encouragements from the factions in the city, he suddenly and unaccountably withdrew, and, after a night’s rest on Scopus, “commenced his retreat with the hostile population gathering round him at every step, and reached Gabas with loss. Here the beasts of burden were killed and the baggage abandoned. As soon as the Romans had entered the pass of Bethhoron, they were assailed in flank and rear and the passage blocked in front. Night alone saved them from utter destruction; and Cestius, displaying the standards and leaving 400 men, to make a show of defending the empty camp, fled with the remnant of his army, pursued by the Jews as far as Antipatris. He lost 5,300 foot and 380 horses; and the engines of war, which he had carried up for the siege of Jerusalem, became an invaluable help to its defense. Having secured this prize, and collected the immense booty, the Jews returned to the city with hymns of triumph, fancying that the days of the Maccabees had returned, and forgetting that the power they had defied wielded the resources of the whole civilized world, while they had forfeited the aid of Omnipotence.”—Philip Smith.

“Soon there was literally a battle for life within the city. The weak and the starving had their last morsels of food snatched from them by the strong; and the strong were tortured and executed because their looks convicted them of having a concealed store. ‘Every kind feeling, love, respect, natural affection, was extinct through the all-absorbing want. Wives would snatch the last morsel from husbands, children from parents, mothers from children; they would intercept even their own milk from the lips of their pining babes.’ If we are allowed to doubt whether Josephus has exaggerated these horrors, we may be sure that his picture of the cruelties of his imperial patron is but too true. As the famine became more intolerable, so did the measures of Titus to force the people to surrender. Wretches who prowled outside the walls during the night, to pick up scraps of food, were scourged and crucified, sometimes to the number of five hundred at a time, and twisted into ludicrous postures by the wantonness of the soldiers; the soldiers bade those that desired peace to behold these examples of Roman mercy.”

Those who witnessed the splendid comet of Donati (A.D. 1858) will at once be able to recognize the form of the flaming sword across the sky.

“The brazen gate of the Temple, which required twenty men to move it on its hinges, flew open of its own accord in the dead of night, as if to let in the advancing armies of the heathen.” (See Philip Smith.)

“And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another, because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.”

The death of Vespasian, in 79 A.D., wrought a transformation in Titus, and he became known as the “love and delight of mankind.” “He had the tact to make himself liked by all. He seems to have been thoroughly kindly and good-natured; he delighted in giving splendid presents, and his memorable saying, ‘I have lost a day,’ is said to have been uttered one evening at the dinner-table when he suddenly remembered that he had not bestowed a gift on any one that day.”

The utmost efforts of Titus to save the sacred building were utterly vain. “The legionaries either could not or would not hear; they rushed on, trampling each other down in their furious haste, or, stumbling over the crumbling ruins, perished with the enemy. Each exhorted the other, and each hurled his blazing brand into the inner part of the edifice, and then hurried to the work of carnage. The unarmed and defenseless people were slain in thousands; they lay heaped, like sacrifices, round the altar; the steps of the Temple ran with streams of blood, which washed down the bodies which lay upon it.”

JESUS OF NAZARETH FROM THE PRESENT JEWISH POINT OF VIEW

In this age and land, Jew and Christian seem destined at last to give one another the glad hand. The old spirit of misunderstanding and often of hate (which to our shame—more to the shame of the Christian than of the Jew—has now lasted nearly a score of centuries), in this light of noon, now and here, is intolerable. At the dawn of the twentieth century, antisemitism in America, even the feeblest whisper of it, is an anachorism, and an anachronism of the grossest sort.

That spirit was natural enough with the church of the early ages, for the church, nearly all of it, was simply the pagan tiger baptized, and labels changed, but not the nature of the beast. The Christ that was presented to the Jew the Jew did well to hate, for he was a Christ of barbaric cruelty, a monster who drove millions of Jews through fire and starvation, out of the world, and this entire people for ages from their homes and countries. If the Jews had not hated and spit on the very name of that Christ, they had been more or less than human.

Among this people the ties of kinship are especially strong, so that when a wrong is done to one, no other flame is needed to make the blood of all boil. With the million of fires burning to death their martyred brethren, quite naturally the air grew too thick with smoke, and their eyes too sore with weeping, for them to see any of the beauty of the Cross. Talk of the sweetness of that Christ was hideous mockery to them. I too would join with them and spit on such a Christ. But now the smoke is getting out of the air, and the Jew, like the rest of us, is beginning to see the real Jesus of the Gospels, and he also, like the rest of us when we see Him aright, can not but respect, admire, love Him—claim Him as one of his own people, saying, with Rabbi Henry Berkowitz, of Philadelphia, this Jew, Jesus, “is the greatest, noblest rabbi of them all,” and as the famous Jewish writer, Max Nordau, touchingly says, “He is one of us.”

Yes, we are living in a better land and in a better time. Here both Christian and Jew clasp the folds of the same flag and say, Our Country, and both look up to the one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and say, Our Father; and may not both, by and by, look to this Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, and say, Our Brother?

Within the past two years I have written to a number of representative Jews, residing in different parts of the world, asking the question, WHAT IS THE JEWISH THOUGHT TO-DAY OF JESUS OF NAZARETH? The inquiry was accompanied with a copy of the letter from Dr. Kohler, which is here published as the first of the series. There are utterances in some of these published replies that may strike strangely and discordantly on orthodox Christian hearts. It will be well for all such to ponder the following letter, here given as prefatory to the other replies. It is from the pen of Dr. Singer, a well-known Jewish scholar, the originator and now the managing editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia:

A LETTER FROM ISIDORE SINGER, Ph.D.

“It has been both a privilege and a pleasure to me to examine in the original manuscript the letters which are printed on the following pages. They are all from representative Jewish scholars, theologians, historians, and philosophers, well and most favorably known in the scientific world of Europe and America. Where it has been necessary to abbreviate for lack of space, I find that the work has been done in a way that does no injustice to the writer. No one is made to say, by faulty translation, or abridgment, or otherwise, what he does not intend to say. It is my hope and most ardent desire that these utterances may greatly help to make known to the Christian world the real heart and mind of my brethren. I am glad to be permitted to add a thought or two of my own.

“I regard Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew of the Jews, one whom all Jewish people are learning to love. His teaching has been an immense service to the world in bringing Israel’s God to the knowledge of hundreds of millions of mankind.

“The great change in Jewish thought concerning Jesus of Nazareth, I can not better illustrate than by this fact:

“When I was a boy, had my father, who was a very pious man, heard the name of Jesus uttered from the pulpit of our synagog, he and every other man in the congregation would have left the building, and the rabbi would have been dismissed at once.

“Now, it is not strange, in many synagogs, to hear sermons preached eulogistic of this Jesus, and nobody thinks of protesting,—in fact, we are all glad to claim Jesus as one of our people.

“ISIDORE SINGER.”

New York, March 25, 1901.

LETTERS FROM REPRESENTATIVE JEWS

[Omissions from letters indicated by ellipses have been made necessary because of lack of space. In another form, at no distant date, it is the expectation that these and similar letters will be published in full. No letter from a Jew who is known to be a Christian convert is here given; hence those portions of letters that discuss the divinity of Christ have generally been omitted.]

From KAUFMANN KOHLER Ph.D., Rabbi of Temple Beth-El, New York:

The true history of Jesus is so wrapped up in myth, the story of his life told in the gospels so replete with contradictions, that it is rather difficult for the unbiased reader to arrive at the true historical facts. Still the beautiful tales about the things that happened around the lake of Galilee show that there was a spiritual daybreak in that dark corner of Judea of which official Judaism had failed to take sufficient cognizance. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” of a new world.

It is assumed by entire Christendom that the Jews in rejecting Jesus Christ brought upon themselves everlasting doom, the inexorable fate of exile, persecution, and hatred. This view is based upon the crucifixion story in the gospel records, which, while shielding the Romans, maligns the Jews, and is incompatible with the simple facts of the Jewish law, the older Christian tradition, with common sense, and with the established character of Pontius Pilate, a very tiger in human shape. Surely the records of the trial demand a revision.

“Did the Jews Reject Christ?” Most assuredly the weird and visionary figure of the dead and rerisen Christ, the crucified Messiah lifted up to the clouds there to become a partaker of God’s nature—a metaphysical or mythological principle of the cosmos—the Jews did reject. They would not, let it cost what it may, surrender the doctrine of the unity and spirituality of God. Jesus, the living man, the teacher and practiser of the tenderest love for God and man, the paragon of piety, humility, and self-surrender, whose very failings were born of overflowing goodness and sympathy with the afflicted, the Jews had no cause to reject. He was one of the best and truest sons of the synagog. Did he not say, “I have not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it”? What reason had the Jews for hating and persecuting him who had nothing of the rigidity of the schoolman, none of the pride of the philosopher and recluse, nor even the implacable zeal of the ancient prophet to excite the popular wrath; who came only to weep with the sorrowing, to lift up the downtrodden, to save and to heal? He was a man of the people; why should the people have raised the cry, “Crucify him!” against him whose only object in life was to bring home the message of God’s love to the humblest of his children? Nor, in fact, was he the only one among the popular preachers of the time who in unsparing language and scathing satire exposed and castigated the abuses of the ruling priesthood, the worldly Sadducees, as well as the hypocrisy and false piety of some of the Pharisean doctors of the law. His whole manner of teaching, the so-called Lord’s Prayer, the Golden Rule, the code of ethics expounded for the elect ones in the Sermon on the Mount, no less than his miraculous cures, show him to have been one of the Essenes, a popular saint.

But he was more than an ordinary teacher and healer of men. He went to the very core of religion and laid bare the depths of the human soul. As a veritable prophet, Jesus, in such striking manner, disclaimed allegiance to any of the Pharisean schools and asked for no authority but that of the living voice within, while passing judgment on the law, in order to raise life to a higher standard. He was a bold religious and social reformer, eager to regenerate Judaism. True, a large number of sayings were attributed to the dead master by his disciples which had been current in the schools. Still, the charm of true originality is felt in these utterances of his when the great realities of life, when the idea of Sabbath, the principle of purity, the value of a human soul, of woman, even of the abject sinner, are touched upon. None can read these parables and verdicts of the Nazarene and not be thrilled with the joy of a truth unspelled before. There is wonderful music in the voice which stays an angry crowd, saying, “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone!” that speaks the words, “Be like children, and you are not far from the kingdom of God!”

“Did the Jews Reject Christ?” Jesus anticipated a reign of perfect love, but centuries of hatred came. Could the Jews, victims of Christian intolerance, look with calmness and admiration upon Jesus, in whose name all the atrocities were perpetrated? Still, the leading thinkers of Judaism willingly recognized that the founder of the Christian Church, as well as that of Islamism, was sent by divine Providence to prepare the pagan world for the Messianic kingdom of truth and righteousness.

The Jew of to-day beholds in Jesus an inspiring ideal of matchless beauty. While he lacks the element of stern justice expressed so forcibly in the law and in the Old-Testament characters, the firmness of self-assertion so necessary to the full development of manhood, all those social qualities which build up the home and society, industry and worldly progress, he is the unique exponent of the principle of redeeming love. His name as helper of the poor, as sympathizing friend of the fallen, as brother of every fellow sufferer, as lover of man and redeemer of woman, has become the inspiration, the symbol, and the watchword for the world’s greatest achievements in the field of benevolence. While continuing the work of the synagog, the Christian Church with the larger means at her disposal created those institutions of charity and redeeming love that accomplished wondrous things. The very sign of the cross has lent a new meaning, a holier pathos to suffering, sickness, and sin, so as to offer new practical solutions for the great problems of evil which fill the human heart with new joys of self-sacrificing love.

All this modern Judaism gladly acknowledges, reclaiming Jesus as one of its greatest sons. But it denies that one single man, or one church, however broad, holds the key to many-sided truth. It waits for the time when all life’s deepest mysteries will have been spelled, and to the ideals of sage and saint that of the seeker of all that is good, beautiful, and true will have been joined; when Jew and Gentile, synagog and church, will merge into the Church universal, into the great city of humanity whose name is “God is there.”

August 23, 1899.

From MORITZ FRIEDLÄNDER, Ph.D., author of “Patristische und Talmudische Studien,” “Das Judenthum in der vorchristlichen griechischen Welt,” etc., Vienna, Austria:

… The synagog of primitive Christianity was the direct offspring of the Jewish synagog. Here, too, the center of sublime, divine service which powerfully influenced the simple and pious souls, was Moses and the prophets, hallowed, in addition, by the splendor of the invisibly ruling Messiah.

In this synagog originated a new Israel, which silently and noiselessly prospered beside “the burden of the law,” which killed the spirit of the Mosaic doctrine and prepared the ossification and dwarfing of Judaism.

This synagog was a true house of God, which made all those who entered it enthusiastic for a pure Mosaism, whose principal doctrine was the love of God and the love of man. Here every one, through teaching and learning, invigorated himself, and even the most simple-minded visitor left the house as an enthusiastic apostle. In short, it was a synagog to which, if it existed to-day, all hearts would be drawn and around which the entire enlightened Judaism of to-day would gather. And Jesus himself, who was the starting-point of the synagog of the Messianic community, who fertilized and rejuvenated it by the sublime Messianic idea, was proclaimed as divine Redeemer because of this rejuvenation, as well as because of the redemption undertaken by him, on the Palestinian soil, from the “unsupportable burdens” which the Pharisee teachers imposed on the people (Matt. xxiii. 4).

Always higher, on to unapproachableness grew his personality, including all that is beautiful, lofty, sublime, and divine, and forcing every one to adoration and self-nobilization. This divine “Son of Man” became the world-ideal, and this sublime ideal has been originated in Judaism, which will ever be remembered as having been predestined by Providence to bring forth such a creation.

November 6, 1899.

From MORRIS JASTROW, Jr., Ph.D., Professor of Semitic Languages, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.:

From the historic point of view, Jesus is to be regarded as a direct successor of the Hebrew prophets. His teachings are synonymous with the highest spiritual aspirations of the human race. Like the prophets, he lays the chief stress upon pure conduct and moral ideas, but he goes beyond the prophets in his absolute indifference to theological speculations and religious rites. It is commonly said that the Jews rejected Jesus. They did so in the sense in which they rejected the teachings of their earlier prophets, but the question may be pertinently asked, Has Christianity accepted Jesus? Neither our social nor our political system rests upon the principles of love and charity, so prominently put forward by Jesus.

The long hoped-for reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity will come when once the teachings of Jesus shall have become the axioms of human conduct.

November 6, 1899.

From BARON DAVID VON GÜNZBURG, St. Petersburg, Russia:

Jesus of Nazareth sought to regenerate the common people of Galilee by infusing into them the moral teaching of the academies; and to this end he stripped the religious ideal of its scientific garb. Understood perfectly by those who listened to him, his simple language, nevertheless, proved a stumbling-block for those who had not known him, but who desired, after his death, to commune with his apostles. They construed current phrases as predicating actual entities, and having thus created a certain type of Messiah, it therefore devolved upon succeeding ages, under the influence of controversy and in the ardor of religious polemics, to harmonize at once all the genuine traditions, all the ill-understood and ill-reported addresses made by him, all his noble aspirations which later generations failed to comprehend, and to bring them all into accord with the ardent faith of new converts as well as with the Bible texts relative to the Messiah.

September 29, 1899.

From PROF. DAVID CASTELLI, author of “Storia degli Israeliti,” Florence, Italy:

… Jesus in a certain sense fulfilled in his person the prophecies of the Old Testament; they reached in him a height beyond which it is impossible to go. He was not the magnificent worldly king, since there could be no question of a worldly king in Israel again, for whom the Hebrews waited in vain; but he was the great teacher of mankind, spreading among all nations that principle of love and humanity which, until then, had remained confined within the limits of Judaism. His word, and after him that of the Apostles, who, like himself, were born and reared in Judaism, were a powerful means of carrying into effect the yet unfulfilled prophecy of the Old Testament: “The Lord will be King of all the earth; in that day God will be one and his name one.”

September 28, 1899.

From MARCUS JASTROW, Ph.D., Rabbi Emeritus of Rodeph-Shalom Congregation, Philadelphia, Pa., Author of the “Dictionary of the Talmud,” etc.:

The thoughtful Jews of all days, and especially of modern tendency of thought, see in Jesus, as depicted in the New Testament, the exponent of a part of the ethics of Judaism, and more especially of its milder side—love and charity. The ethical sayings of Jesus reflect the conception of Judaism in his own period, as it was current among its spiritual leaders, such as Hillel, Rabbi Akiba, Ben Zoma, and others. To a heathen world merged in vice and crime, to a civilization that led the thoughtful among Romans and Greeks toward the abyss of pessimism and despair, Christianity offered the bright prospect of forgiveness and reconciliation with goodness. For the Jews it had no mission, no new gifts to offer. Its ethics appear to the modern Jew one-sided and exaggerated; the sense of justice appears to be pushed into the background in favor of an unrealizable ideal of love.

Judaism prohibits revenge and the bearing of grudge, commands the assistance of an enemy in distress, but “to love one’s enemy” appears to the modern Jew a somewhat morbid philanthropy that could never have been seriously meant. To bear indignities with patience, “to be of the insulted and not of the insulters,” is a Jewish principle, but to offer the right cheek to him who slaps you on the left, to offer the undergarment to him who takes away your cloak—no, we will not and we can not do it. Hence it is that we Jews, of our modern days, speak of Jesus with that respect which all high-minded dreamers of all ages and nations inspire, even though we can not accept all their ideas and ideals, and are mindful of the fact that it is to noble dreamers that humanity is indebted for its most precious possessions.

September 4, 1899.

From ÉMILE LÉVY, Chief Rabbi, Bayonne, France:

Wide as the difference may be in certain essential points between Christianity and Judaism, yet the former approaches the latter through its origin, and a common basis which is love of God and man. In proclaiming the superiority of spirit over matter, and the principle of immortality of the soul and of a future life; in exhorting mankind in a touching and poetical language, ever trying to come nearer the divine example by a charitable, humble, modest, and pure life, Christ has rendered immense services to humanity and to the cause of progress and civilization, for he thus spread the Jewish doctrine, which aims at a continual improvement of the individual and of society, and contributes to the preparation of the Messianic era and of the brotherhood of the nations.

October 24, 1899.

From HENRY BERKOWITZ, D.D., Rabbi of Rodeph Shalom Congregation, Founder and Chancellor of the Jewish Chautauqua Society, Philadelphia, Pa.:

… To me one of the saddest and most tragic facts in history is this, that Jesus, the gentlest and noblest rabbi of them all, should have become lost to his own people by reason of the conduct of those who called themselves his followers. In Jesus there is the very flowering of Judaism. What pathos, then, in the fact that his own people have been made to shun his very name; that even to-day they speak it with bated breath, because it has been made to them a symbol and a synonym of all that is unjewish, unchristian—irreligious.…

November 1, 1899.

From JOSEPH REINACH, Paris, France, formerly Member of the Chamber of Deputies, and editor-in-chief of La République Française; Secretary to Gambetta, and editor of Gambetta’s works:

… The characteristic mark of Jesus’s moral is love, the purest and noblest love that ever existed—love for all human creatures, love for the poor, love for the wicked. Love is joy, and love is duty, and love is life. Humanity, since its first day and to its last day, was and will be thirsty for love, and Jesus is and will remain one of the highest, if not the highest, type of humanity, because his words, and his legend, and his poetry are and will be an eternal source of love.

November 28, 1899.

From CESARE LOMBROSO, Professor of Psychiatry and Criminology, University of Turin, Italy:

In my eyes Jesus is one of the greatest geniuses the world has produced, but he was, like all geniuses, somewhat unbalanced, anticipating by ten centuries the emancipation of the slave, and by twenty centuries socialism and the emancipation of woman. He did not proceed by a precise, systematic demonstration, but through short sentences and by leaps and bounds, so that without the downfall of the Temple, and without the persecutions of the Christians under Nero, his work would have been lost.…

September 29, 1899.

From MAX NORDAU, M.D., critic and philosopher, Paris, France:

… Jesus is soul of our soul, as he is flesh of our flesh. Who, then, could think of excluding him from the people of Israel? St. Peter will remain the only Jew who said of the son of David, “I know not the man.” If the Jews up to the present time have not publicly rendered homage to the sublime moral beauty of the figure of Jesus, it is because their tormentors have always persecuted, tortured, assassinated them in his name. The Jews have drawn their conclusions from the disciples as to the master, which was a wrong, a wrong pardonable in the eternal victims of the implacable, cruel hatred of those who called themselves Christians. Every time that a Jew mounted to the sources and contemplated Christ alone, without his pretended faithful, he cried, with tenderness and admiration: “Putting aside the Messianic mission, this man is ours. He honors our race and we claim him as we claim the Gospels—flowers of Jewish literature and only Jewish.…”

From ISIDORE HARRIS, M.A., Rabbi of West London Synagog of British Jews, London, England:

It seems to me that the truest view of Jesus is that which regards him as a Jewish reformer of a singularly bold type. In his days, Judaism had come to be overlaid with formalism. The mass of rabbinical laws that in the course of centuries had grown round the Torah of Israel threatened to crush out its spirit. Jesus protested against this tendency with all the energy of an enthusiast. Ceremonial can never be anything more than a means to an end—that end being the realization of the higher life of communion with God. The rabbinical doctors of the law were inclined to treat it as an end in itself, and this Jesus saw was a mistake. In taking up this position, he was simply following in the path that had already been marked out centuries before by the Hebrew prophets.

October 17, 1899.

From JECHESKIEL CARO, Ph.D., Chief Rabbi, Lemberg, Austria:

Primitive Christianity, as Jesus of Nazareth taught and preached it, is not at all different from the ethical principles of Judaism. He himself proclaimed that he did not come to destroy the law. In morality and the love of God and man (Deut. vi. 5; Matt. xxii. 37; Lev. xvii. 18; Matt. xxii. 39) are contained the real essence and the categorical imperative of religion.…

October 18, 1899.

From N. PORGES, Ph.D., Rabbi, Leipsic, Germany:

Even the most conscientious Jew may, without hesitation, recognize that in view of the immense effect and success of his life, Jesus has become a figure of the highest order in the history of religion, and that the noble man, the pure character, the mild heart-winning personality, come forth unmistakable even from the mythical cover which surrounds his person. The fact that Jesus was a Jew should, I think, in our eyes, rather help than hinder the acknowledgment of his high significance, and it is completely incomprehensible to me why a Jew should think and speak about Jesus otherwise than with the highest respect, although we, as Jews, repudiate the belief in his Messianic character and his divine humanity with the utmost energy, from innate conviction.

September 28, 1899.

From the late JAMES H. HOFFMAN, Founder and first President of the Hebrew Technical Institute, New York City:

… I revere him (Jesus) for having brought home by his own life and his teachings, to the innermost hearts and souls of mankind, of all times, in every station, the eternal truths as first embodied in the Mosaic code and proclaimed in undying words by the prophets. I recognize in him the blending of the divine and human, the lofty and lowly, showing the path for the dual nature of man, by divine aspirations to gain the victory over the earthly life, tending to draw him downward—the Son of God triumphing over the child of the earth.…

October 6, 1899.

From ADOLF BRUELL, Ph.D., Editor “Populär-Wissenschaftliche Monatsblütter,” Frankfort-on-the-Main, Germany:

… In Christianity, as it is represented in the Gospels, the sublime doctrines of Judaism, if we subtract the dogmas, find their most beautiful expression. If we deduct the purely human additions, as well in Judaism where they take the form of observances, as in Christianity, where they crystallize themselves into dogmas, we find that there is no real antagonism between the two. And how could it be otherwise, for did not Jesus stand upon the ground of biblical and prophetical Judaism?

…

The fact that love, the highest religious principle, has not yet fully penetrated Christianity, as is shown by the awful fanaticism of the Middle Ages and the odious anti-Jewish movement of our own time, does not alter the fact that Jesus promulgated a sublime doctrine which is in full harmony with Judaism, and with which Christianity must be entirely imbued before it can be seriously called the religion of Christ.…

Judaism and Christianity both have still to go through a process of purification as to law and dogma, and only after these separating walls have fallen, will Jews and Christians, and with them all humanity, on the terrain of pure morality and the spirit of the prophets, tender one another forever the hand of brotherhood in the noble spirit of reconciliation.

Meanwhile, it would be appropriate that honest and enthusiastic men might form an alliance in order to reconcile Judaism and Christianity, and for this purpose Jesus and the prophets would be rather genial helpers than detractors.

October 10, 1899.

From THÉODORE REINACH, Ph.D., former President of the Société des Etudes Juives, Paris, France:

Although we know very little with certainty concerning the life and teachings of Christ, we know enough of him to believe that, in morals as well as in theology, he was the heir and continuator of the old prophets of Israel. There is no necessary gap between Isaiah and Jesus, but it is the misfortune of both Christianity and Judaism that a gap has been effected by the infiltration of heathen ideas in the one, and the stubborn (only too explainable) reluctance of the other, to admit among its prophets one of its greatest sons. I consider it the duty of both enlightened Christians and Jews to endeavor to bridge over this gap.

December 17, 1899.

From JACOB H. SCHIFF, New York City:

We Jews honor and revere Jesus of Nazareth as we do our own prophets who preceded him. By his martyrdom, his teachings have been emphasized, and these are to this day I believe often better practised by the descendants of the race he sprang from than by those who have become the followers of Christ in name, but not in spirit, else the prejudice practised by the latter against Jews would not exist.…

September 5, 1899.

From M. LAZARUS, Ph.D., late Professor of Philosophy, University of Berlin, author of “Die Ethik des Judenthums,” Meran, Austria:

… I am of the opinion that we should endeavor with all possible zeal to obtain an exact understanding of the great personality of Jesus and to reclaim him for Judaism.

January 24, 1901.

The following questions were sent to a number of Jewish scholars, whose answers are tabulated below:

Question 1. Do you agree with Dr. Kohler that there was a spiritual daybreak on the shores of Galilee nineteen centuries ago, which was not sufficiently recognized by the official Sanhedrin at that time?

Q. 2. Do you esteem Jesus to have been one “sent of God” to reveal the Father more clearly to men?

Q. 3. Do you believe that his mission has been of advantage in making known to the Gentile world the God of Abraham?

Q. 4. Do you consider him to have been a Jewish prophet? If so, would you indicate in what order he would stand, in your judgment, respecting the earlier prophets?

Q. 5. Is there a growing interest among Jews in the study of the sayings and life of Jesus?

Q. 6. Is there a growing willingness in Judaism, as says Dr. Kohler, to reclaim Jesus as one of her greatest sons?

Answers to Questions.

Name. Question 1. Question 2. Question 3. Question 4. Question 5. Question 6.

I. Zangwill, English novelist and critic. London, Eng. Not a daybreak, but a burst of sunshine. Yes. Only among the liberal thinkers. Yes, among some of those thinkers, but not in one or two whose thinking is characteristically Jewish.

I. L. Leucht, Rabbi of Touro Synagog, New Orleans, La. I do. I recognize in him, one sent by God, like every man that uttereth a truth, is a messenger of God. Christ intended to popularize monotheism among the heathens, and I believe that Christianity has been a great help. I do not consider Jesus a Jewish prophet in the sense your question indicates. Yes. Yes.

M. Gaster, Chief Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of England. London. No. No. He has been of advantage in making known to the Gentile world the God of Abraham. I do not consider him to have been a Jewish prophet. No. No.

G. J. Emanuel, Rabbi of Birmingham Synagog, Birmingham, England. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, following Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekel, Amos and Micah. Yes. Yes.

Max Landsberg, Ph.D., Rabbi, Rochester, N. Y. I do not. I do esteem him to have been “sent of God” in the same sense as hundreds of other Jewish teachers. I agree with Maimonides, who holds that Christianity and Mohammedanism have aided in spreading the purer God ideas. I do not consider him to have been a Jewish prophet, but a Jewish teacher and preacher. There is a growing interest among all men in the study of comparative religion, in which the Jews participate. The Jewish prejudice against the very name of Jesus has been caused by the long persecution of Jews carried on for his sake.

Moïse Schwab, Librarian at Bibliothèque Nationale, translator into French of the Talmud Yerushalmi, Paris, France. Yes, but Jesus, professing doctrines contrary to the Sanhedrin, whose authority he recognized (Matt. xxiii. 2) was subject to the severity of the Mosaic law (Deut. xvii. 8-14). In spite of the sympathy of the Jew for the personality of Jesus, he, worshiping God alone, refuses to see in Jesus a son of God, or His envoy in a supernatural sense. Yes, without doubt; his religious mission has become the greatest blessing for the entire world. Jesus may well be, as Jewish prophet, the equal even of Isaiah, and placed above those other Jewish prophets whose spiritual horizon is not so broad. The enlightened Jews regard Jesus as an illustrious co-religionist and a disciple of the rabbis; and take consequently an interest in the study of his life and his influence on the world. See answer to Question 5.

From SIMON WOLF, LL.D., former Consul of the United States to Egypt, Vice-President of Order B’ne B’rith, Washington, D. C.:

I have not had the time nor the desire to investigate the alleged divinity of the Christian Savior. I have, however, recognized the great influence his character and labors have exercised throughout the world. If properly understood and if properly construed, I have no doubt whatsoever that what he aimed at and labored for would prove of great benefit to every human being. I look upon him, in short, as a great teacher and reformer, one who aimed at the uplifting of suffering humanity, whose every motive was kindness, mercy, charity, and justice, and if his wise teaching and example have not always been followed, the blame should not be his, but rather those who have claimed to be his followers. I have the very highest regard for him as a man who reflects in his sayings the divine Spirit, which after all is nothing more or less than a reflex of the Jewish ethics in which he was so well grounded.

October 9, 1899.

From H. WEINSTOCK, Sacramento, Cal. Extract from a letter to Dr. K. Kohler:

[The letter urges reasons why the life and sayings of Jesus should be taught in Jewish Sabbath-schools. Dr. Kohler approves of the suggestion.]

With the growing enlightenment and the broadening atmosphere under which the modern Jew lives, the progressive Jew looks upon the Nazarene as one of Israel’s great teachers, who has a potent influence on civilization, whose words and deeds have left an undying imprint upon the human mind, and have done heroic work toward universalizing the God of Israel and the Bible. This change of sentiment toward Jesus is largely due to the intelligent and progressive preaching of our modern rabbis, who seem to appreciate the glory Jesus has shed upon the Jewish name, and the splendid work he did in broadening the influence of the Jewish teachings. But, despite all this, the fact remains, that, so far as I know, not one Jewish Sabbath-school in the land teaches a single word concerning Jesus of Nazareth.

To maintain a continued silence in the Jewish Sabbath-school on Jesus would seem a grave error.…

The influence of “Jesus the Christ” may be diminishing in the rational world, but the influence of “Jesus the Man” is increasing daily the world over, and no Jewish education can be complete that does not embody within it a comprehensive knowledge of Jesus the Jew, his life, his teachings, and the causes which led to his death.…

It would seem to be in the highest interest of the modern Jew and Judaism that the curriculum of at least every reform Jewish Sabbath-school should, from a purely historical standpoint, embrace a simple yet comprehensible history of the life of Jesus, and its wonderful moral and religious influence, in order that the rising Jews may be able to appreciate better the powerful influence Judaic teachings and the Bible have had upon civilization, and the exalted place given by the world to one of their teachers and brethren, who lived a purely Jewish life and taught only Jewish precepts.…

September 26, 1899.

From GUSTAV GOTTHEIL, Ph.D., Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanu-El, New York:

The keynote of prophetic religion of the Jewish prophets was holiness of life and purity of heart. Love and mercy shown by men, one to another, make up the acceptable worship of the Holy One of Israel. To place the Master of Nazareth by their side can surely be no dishonor to him, nor can it dim the luster of his name. If he has added to their spiritual bequests new jewels of religious truth, and spoken words which are words of life, because they touch the deepest springs of the human heart, why should we Jews not glory in him? Show us the man, help us to understand his mind, draw from his face the thick veil behind which his personality has been buried for the Jewish life by the heartless zeal of his so-called followers, and you will find the Jewish heart as responsive to truth and light and love as that of all other nations. The question whether Jesus suffered martyrdom solely for his new teachings or for other causes, we will not discuss. The crown of thorns on his head makes him only the more our brother. For to this day it is borne by his people. Were he alive to-day, who, think you, would be nearer his heart—the persecuted or the persecutors?

October 24, 1899.

From EMANUEL WEILL, Rabbi of the Portuguese Congregation, Paris, France:

I do not know the secret of God, but I believe that Jesus and Christianity were providential means, useful to the Deity in guiding all men gradually, and by an effort, keeping pace with the mental state of the majority of men from paganism up to the pure and true idea of the divinity.

The error—one might almost say a fatal one—of Christianity is to believe that it is an end in itself, whereas it is but a step, and as error often generates evil, Christianity in its evolution toward its end has effected side by side much good as well as much harm.

We Jews await the Christians on God’s appointed day, when, all humanity having become more enlightened, will rally to the spiritualistic principle which is that of Judaism, viz.: that of the unity and the perfect spirituality of God, in opposition to any incarnation and to any trinitarian idea whatever.

Meanwhile, I think that Jews and Christians, divided on the identification of Jesus with God, but both in accord in acknowledging this God the same for all, consider themselves children of the same Father, and thus love one another with brotherly love.

October 11, 1899.

From M. KAYSERLING, Ph.D., Rabbi, Budapest, Hungary:

The Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah and Redeemer, but they recognized him as “the extraordinary man” who first showed to the heathen world the way to natural religion and moral perfection. “The founder of Christianity,” says the pious and scholarly Jacob Emden of Altona, who lived about the middle of the last century, “was a twofold benefactor to the world, since, on the one hand, he strengthened with all his might the doctrine of Moses and insisted upon its eternal validity; and, on the other hand, drew heathens away from idolatry and obligated them to observe the seven Noachian commandments to which he added moral teachings. The alliance of the nations in our time can be regarded as an alliance to the glory of God, whose aim is to proclaim over all the world that there is only one God who is Master in heaven and on earth; who rewards the good and punishes the evil.”

This is the opinion of the immense majority of the Jews of our epoch about Jesus of Nazareth, “the extraordinary man.” We all look forward to that sublime end when all human beings, prompted by the love of fellow men, shall recognize God and worship Him in full harmony and glory as the one only God.

November 20, 1899.

From DAVID PHILIPSON, D.D., Professor in Hebrew Union College, Rabbi of Mound Street Temple, Cincinnati, Ohio:

There is no backwardness nor hesitancy on the part of modern Jewish thought in acknowledging the greatness of the teacher of Nazareth, the sweetness of his character, the power of his genius. But, as a matter of course, we accord him no exceptional position as the flower of humanity, the special incarnation of the Divinity. Judaism holds that every man is the son of God. Jesus was a Jew of the Jews. The orthodox Christianity of to-day he would scarcely recognize, as its chief dogmas were unknown to him.

September 19, 1899.

From EMIL G. HIRSCH, Ph.D., LL.D., L.H.D., Rabbi of Sinai Congregation, Professor of Rabbinical Literature in Chicago University, Chicago, Ill.:

… For me Jesus is an historical reality. To understand his work and correctly to value his mission, one must bear in mind his own time. Galilean as he was, he must have grown up under influences making for an intense Jewish patriotism.

… Under close analysis, his precepts will be found to contain nothing that was new. There is scarce an expression credited to him but has its analogon in the well-known sayings of the rabbis. He did not pretend to found a new religion. The doctrines he developed were the familiar truths of Israel’s prophetic monotheism. Nor did his ethical proclamation sound a note before unknown in the household of the synagogue or in the schools. He was in method a wonderfully gifted Haggadist. His originality lies in the striking form which he understood to give to the old vitalities of his ancestral religion. He moved the heart of the people.

… The Jews of every shade of religious belief do not regard Jesus in the light of Paul’s theology. But the gospel Jesus, the Jesus who teaches so superbly the principles of Jewish ethics, is revered by all the liberal expounders of Judaism. His words are studied; the New Testament forms a part of Jewish literature. Among the great preceptors that have worded the truths of which Judaism is the historical guardian, none, in our estimation and esteem, takes precedence of the rabbi of Nazareth. To impute to us suspicious sentiments concerning him does us gross injustice. We know him to be among our greatest and purest.

January 26, 1901.

MEMORANDUM JOTTINGS

Here are some of the jottings which I find on my memorandum pad, suggested by the reading of these Jewish letters—letters which it would be difficult to read without feeling that at last Jew and Christian, after a horrible nightmare of misunderstandings centuries long, are coming to see that after all they are first cousins, if not actually brothers.

1. Right nobly is it in some of these Jewish writers to say that Jesus is not to be blamed for those awful persecutions committed for ages in His name, and in reverse of His teachings. As He foretold, many were called by His name whom He knew not, and who knew not Him—false prophets who came in sheep’s clothing, but were, within, ravening wolves. Sometimes these wolves tore the Jews, sometimes they tore one another, and sometimes they tore the real Christians. But we live, all of us, in a better time. The glowing sky is not sunset, but is sunrise—sunrise of a glorious day that is to reveal a far wider brotherhood than the world ever heretofore has known.

2. Jewish friends, “Let the dead past bury its dead.” All the world is bound to realize sooner or later that your history has been of inestimable advantage to the world. Turn your faces to that rapidly advancing future. The divine reason will appear for all the sorrows of the past ages, for all the persecutions, misapprehensions, including the errors into which you and we have fallen—largely because of these, not in spite of them, the Jewish race will arise a purified flame.

Look the future in the face. As Shelley has put it: “The past is dead, and the future alone is living.” Why not, all of us, permit the ashes to grow over the embers of hate, and let the rawness of all wounds, real or imaginary, heal over? Distance now gives a wider survey and a juster survey to both Jew and Christian.

Waste no time in denying hostility to Jesus nineteen hundred years ago. Who alive to-day is to be blamed for that any more than for the forty years of rebellion in the wilderness? No more are you to be blamed for the death of Jesus than are we to-day to be blamed for Washington having held slaves, and for the slave auction-block in the Nation’s capital, and for the slave lash a generation ago.

3. The Mosaic system of ceremonies, as seen before the destruction of Jerusalem, was beautiful. How mournfully are Jewish eyes still fixed upon the broken shell. Friends, lift your eyes and see what came out of that shell; see in the boughs above, the singing-bird of the civilization of to-day. Claim it all, for God has given it to the world through your people.

From the matrix of the Jewish soul sprang Christianity. Heine, the great Jewish writer of the last century, has wittily put it: Half the civilized world worships a Jew, the other half a Jewess.

4. Come, children of the prophets, your home, for a season at least, is in the West, not in the East. Let not your hearts longer be troubled. Cease dragging about with you that monstrous corpse of memory—the persecutions committed against you, no matter how frightfully you have been misunderstood and wronged.

Above all let it never be truly said that the Jew has suffered so much, and come so far, now only to reap despair and bitterness. There are two Jewish tendencies to-day, one to cold materialism, the motto of which is “make money, eat, drink, be merry, to-morrow ye die”; the other is upward, the path the prophets walked. This latter tendency must be made to dominate. The time will come, with many already here, when the Jew will turn again to his sublime mission and say, like Agassiz, “I have not time to make money.”

Surely, the Jew of America is to be a regenerating educational force to the Jews of all the world, and not to the Jews only. It does not yet appear fully what he shall be; but in some way it will appear that this mass of concentrated human energy will arise above the commercial, the material, the sordid, which so dominates much of the so-called Christian world. The Jewish genius is essentially religious. The Jew will again come to himself and find his center, and God will vindicate His purpose through this wonderful people from Abraham’s time to the present.

The Jew has grown strong by the law of the survival of the fittest. For eighteen centuries he has not known what security is, always living by his resource of keenest wit—the feeblest dying out. Those who were physically strong enough and mentally clever enough, escaped destruction, and these became the parents of the new and stronger generation. Thus the law of compensation works justice. For ages the Jew was compelled to be a money-lender as the business of such an one was held to be disreputable for Christians. Thus the Jew mastered the problems of finance, and now when finance rules the world, the Jew is naturally on the throne. The whirligig of time is twirled by a hand that cares for justice.

5. How unseemly, impossible, that it should prove in the end that they who have been to the world messengers of God, whose feet have been beautiful upon the mountain-tops and who did eat the bread of angels, should now forget their prophets and their God and grovel in materialism, and seek to satisfy their hunger with husks. No; this can not be. This people have done too glorious things for humanity, for such an ending. They have in them the nobility that will assert itself. They are born for great things yet to be; they have been made in large molds. They, like the best of us, have often slipped, but are now coming to themselves. For one I am glad, and thank God for it.

Now will the Christian Church permit a friendly exhortation: You have tried everything to get the Jewish people to understand Jesus of Nazareth, except one thing, love. Try that, for they believe in love; and you believe in love. Let both Jew and Christian get on this common ground, and have respect for the honest convictions of one another, and then both may clasp hands and look into each other’s eyes, and repeat the words uttered alike by Moses and by Jesus:

“The Lord our God is one God. And thou shalt love him with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”

The lightnings from Mount Sinai and the rays of light and heat from Mount Calvary are one, and will yet fuse into brotherhood all peoples of the earth.

I. K. F.

OTHER TESTIMONY TO JESUS

WILLIAM McKINLEY.

[A Letter. Washington, D.C., 1900.]

The religion which Christ founded has been a mighty influence in the civilization of the human race. If we of to-day owed to it nothing more than this, our debt of appreciation would be incalculable. The doctrine of love, purity, and right-living has step by step won its way into the heart of mankind, has exalted home and family, and has filled the future with hope and promise.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.

[Complete Works. (Emilius.) Edinburgh: 1778, vol. ii., pp. 215-218.]

I will confess to you that the majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the Gospel has its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers, with all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible are they, compared with the Scriptures! Is it possible that the sacred personage whose history they contain should be Himself a mere man?… Where is the man, where the philosopher, who could so live and die, without weakness, and without ostentation? When Plato describes his imaginary righteous man, loaded with all the punishments of guilt, yet meriting the highest rewards of virtue, he describes exactly the character of Jesus Christ. The resemblance is so striking that all the Church fathers perceived it.

THOMAS JEFFERSON.

[Works. Philadelphia: 1871, vol. iv., p. 479.]

I am a Christian in the only sense in which He [Christ] wishes any one to be: sincerely attracted to His doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to Him every human excellence, and believing He never claimed any other.

WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE.

[Review of Ecce Homo, from Gleanings of Past Years. New York: 1879, vol. iii., pp. 84, 93.]

Through the fair gloss of His manhood, we perceive the rich bloom of His divinity. If He is not now without an assailant, at least He is without a rival. If He be not the Sun of Righteousness, the Friend that gives His life for His friends and that sticketh closer than a brother, the unfailing Consoler, the constant Guide, the everlasting Priest and King, at least, as all must confess, there is no other to come into His room.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE.

[Conversations with Eckermann. London: 1874, pp. 567-569.]

If I am asked whether it is in my nature to pay Him devout reverence, I say, certainly. I bow before Him as the divine manifestation of the highest principles of morality.… Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences go on gaining in depth and breadth, and the human mind expand as it may, it will never go beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it glistens and shines forth in the Gospel.…

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

[Prose Works. Boston: 1870, vol. i., pp. 69, 70.]

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, He lived in it, and had His being there. Alone in all history, He estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnated Himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of His world.…

FRANÇOIS P. G. GUIZOT.

[Meditations on the Essence of Christianity. New York: 1885, p. 320 et seq.]

The supernatural being and power of Jesus may be disputed; but the perfection, the sublimity of His acts and precepts, of His life and His moral law, are incontestable. And in effect, not only are they not contested, but they are admired and celebrated enthusiastically, and complacently too; it would seem as if it were desired to restore to Jesus as man, and man alone, the superiority of which men deprived Him in refusing to see in Him the Godhead.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

[John S. C. Abbott’s Life of Napoleon, vol. ii, p. 612.]

Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded His empire upon love, and at this hour, millions of men would die for Him.…

This testimony from Napoleon has been much disputed. Dr. Philip Schaff, weighing the argument for and against, says that he believes that it is authentic in substance.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

[Letter to President Stiles or Yale College, March 9, 1790.]

I think His [Jesus Christ’s] system of morals and religion as He left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see.

JEAN PAUL RICHTER.

[Dawnings for Germany. Complete Works, pp. 33, 36.]

It concerns Him who, being the holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among the holy, lifted, with His pierced hands, empires off their hinges, turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages.

JOHN STUART MILL.

[Three Essays on Religion. New York: 1874, pp. 253, 255.]

Religion can not be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

[Sartor Resartus, pp. 155, 158.]

If thou ask to what length man has carried it in this manner, look on our divinest symbol, Jesus of Nazareth, and His life and His biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human thought not yet reached: this Christianity and Christendom—a symbol of quite perennial infinite character, whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest.…

WILLIAM E. LECKY.

[History of European Morals. London: 1869, vol. ii., p. 9.]

It may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists. This has, indeed, been the wellspring of whatever is best and purest in the Christian life. Amid all the sins and failings, amid all the priestcraft and persecution and fanaticism, that have defaced the Church, it has preserved, in the character and example of its Founder, an enduring principle of regeneration.

JOSEPH ERNEST RENAN.

[The Life of Jesus. New York: 1864, pp. 215, 365, 375, 376.]

He founded the pure worship—of no age, of no clime—which shall be that of all lofty souls to the end of time. Not only was His religion that day (John iv. 24) the benign religion of humanity, but it was the absolute religion; and if other planets have inhabitants endowed with reason and morality, their religion can not be different from that which Jesus proclaimed at Jacob’s well.…

Whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will grow young without ceasing; His legend will call forth tears without end; His sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born greater than Jesus.

THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST—A SUCCINCT HISTORY

BY DANIEL SEELYE GREGORY. D.D., LL.D.

The legend of “The Wandering Jew,” in its various forms, has its basis in the doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ, or of His personal return to this world. This is true of the form of the legend that underlies Croly’s romance, the Lord Himself having given assurance of His return to the hero of the work and the arch-plotter, in the words of doom: “Tarry thou till I come!” The doctrine of the Second Coming has been accepted by the Christian Church and embodied in its creeds in all ages.

The Second Advent finds its analog in many respects in the First Advent, and that, not in its facts only, but in its difficulties as well. According to the Old Testament, a great Redeemer was to appear; he was to be a prophet, priest, and king, and was to deliver his people from their sins and from their oppressors; he was to set up a kingdom that should become universal, absorbing all earthly kingdoms; and he was to exalt his people to the summit of prosperity and glory. These predictions turned the minds of the whole Jewish race toward the future, in confident expectation of the coming Messiah, in whose birth and career they all anticipated their fulfilment. Nevertheless, tho Christ came indeed fulfilling prophecy, it was “in a way which no man did anticipate or could have anticipated.”

So the main features of the Second Advent have been prophetically presented with like fulness, and yet, as of old, the Church has had to remain “satisfied with the great truths which those prophecies unfold, and leave the details to be explained by the event.”

The many theories of the Second Coming of Christ and of the millennium—or the thousand years’ reign of Christ at the end of time, as connecting with that coming—may be reduced to two, one based upon the literal and the other upon the spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures on this subject.

1st. The literal, or Chiliastic, notion of the millennium, as held by some Christians, was derived from the Jews, and was largely confined originally to the converts from Judaism to Christianity. The Jewish doctrine received its peculiar form from Rabbi Elias, who lived about two centuries before the Christian era. According to this ante-Jewish tradition:

“The world is to last seven thousand years—six thousand to be years of toil and trouble, and the seventh thousand to be a grand Sabbatism. It is to be ushered in by the advent of the Messiah, who is to establish his throne at Jerusalem. The Holy City is to be rebuilt with surpassing magnificence, as described by Tobit (xiii., xiv.); the Jews are to return to Palestine; their pious ancestors are to be raised from the dead and reign in their own land, with their offspring, under the Messiah” (see T. O. Summers, in Johnson’s “Universal Cyclopedia,” article “Millennium”).

Some of the early Christians—like the early Jews, pressed with persecutions and longing for temporal deliverance—adopted this literal view, except that they modified it by recognizing Jesus as the true Messiah, and by acknowledging the equality of Gentile with Jewish believers in the millennial age. The Thessalonian Christians, in particular, early developed a tendency to the literal, Chiliastic interpretation, which was, however, checked and corrected by Paul’s letters to them.

But the first teacher who is clearly recorded as having adopted the crude Jewish notion was Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, in Phrygia; altho Cerinthus, a heretic of the first century, is said to have held it. According to Irenæus, Papias pretended to have received a glowing tradition direct from the Apostle John embodying and enlarging all the Jewish literalism.

In part it is to this effect: “The days shall come in which there shall be vines which shall severally have ten thousand branches, and every one of these shall have ten thousand lesser branches, and every one of these branches shall have ten thousand twigs, and every one of these twigs shall have ten thousand clusters of grapes, and in every one of these clusters shall be ten thousand grapes, and every one of these grapes being pressed shall give twenty-five metretas of wine; and when a person shall take hold of one of these sacred bunches, another shall cry out, ‘I am a better bunch, take me, and by me bless the Lord.’”

Irenæus reports similar fanciful traditions respecting extraordinary temporal blessings during the millennial period. Papias taught that Christ’s reign on earth should be corporeal. In the main, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Tertullian, Nepos, and Lactantius agree with Papias, teaching the Christians under their instruction these views, each varying the details according to his own fancy.

The disciples of Papias and their successors naturally pressed into their service Rev. xx. 1-10, interpreting it with the baldest literalness.

The same method has been used by the later followers, who have largely held to a literal, corporeal reign of Christ on earth for a thousand years. There has often been coupled with this view—growing out of Christ’s teaching of the Imminency of his Second Coming—a belief in the Immediacy of that Coming.

2d. The usual or Catholic theory of the millennium has its basis in the spiritual, rather than literal, interpretation of the Scriptures on this subject. It rejects alike Jewish traditions and Patristic fancies.

According to this view, the number 1,000 is often employed in the Scriptures as “denoting a definite number for an indefinite.” It is so used manifestly in Psalm xc. 4, in 2 Peter iii. 8, and in Rev. xx. 1-7. In the last passage, as has been often remarked, it is “evidently a definite number for an indefinite,” indicating a long period. The entire passage is figurative, in keeping with the enigmatical book in which it is found. The angel with the key of the abyss, a chain and a seal to bind and confine the devil, thrones and the souls of martyrs seated upon them, and judgment given to them—these are all “pictorial representations of the circumscription of Satan’s power, the revival of the martyr spirit in the Church, and the general prevalence of truth and righteousness in the earth. This agrees with the figurative style of the Apocalypse, and corresponds with the predictions concerning the prosperity of the Church in the last days. In no other place is there any allusion to a millennium.”

This interpretation, it is held, is agreeable to the style of prophecy, that is elsewhere employed in the Revelation (compare Isa. xxvi. 19; Ezek. xxxvii. 13, 14; Hos. vi. 2; Rev. xi. 7, 11). This spiritual view also agrees with the paracletal work of Christ, while the Judaico-Christian does not; it is favorable to the efforts of the Church for the conversion of the world, and accords with the general teachings of the Scriptures concerning “the last things.”

But while the literal method has been to some extent followed, there has been a common or Catholic Church-doctrine which, as will be seen, has alone been embodied in the creeds of Christendom. That common, creedal, or Catholic doctrine embraces the teachings that—

1st. The Second Advent of Jesus is to be a personal, visible, and glorious advent as the Son of God.

2d. It is to be preceded by the universal diffusion of the Gospel, the conversion of the Jews and the coming of Antichrist.

3d. It is to be accompanied by the resurrection of the dead, just and unjust, the general judgment, the end of the world, and the consummation of Christ’s kingdom.

The cardinal passages of Scripture on this doctrine are Matthew xxiv. and the two Epistles to the Thessalonians—the latter of which was apparently rendered necessary by the development of the teachings in the former. It is not possible to enter here into a detailed interpretation of these passages. Had there been no extraneous influences at work, what is claimed to be the simple and natural interpretation of these Scriptures, which has always been in accord with the Catholic doctrine embodied in the creeds, would probably have continued to be the faith of all Christians.

The later-Jewish doctrine of the Messianic kingdom upon earth was a main influence in directing the new development. The disciples being Jews were naturally infected with this view, and did not rise above it till after the experiences of Pentecost.

Millenarianism or Chiliasm naturally arose out of sympathy with this Jewish materialism, and spread to some extent among the Jewish Christians in the early Church. There was also introduced the doctrine of two resurrections, based on the literal understanding of Rev. xx., unmodified by the teachings of Jesus in Matt, xxiv. With the Second Advent of Christ, according to this view, is to take place the first resurrection, that of the righteous dead at that time. Then is to follow a personal, corporeal reign of Christ for a thousand years—a millennium—upon the renovated earth. At the close of this millennial period, the second resurrection, that of the righteous and the wicked, is to occur, and the end of the world.

As already hinted, this doctrine at first started and became prevalent among the Jewish, as distinguished from the Gentile, Christians. Persecutions arising from time to time, and the distressed conditions resulting from governmental opposition have, however, extended to the Gentile Christians belief in the corporeal features of Chiliasm. They have likewise resulted at various times in an earnest longing for the immediate return of Christ, in an expectation of His immediate setting up of His kingdom in the place of the earthly kingdoms, and in belief in the imminence of His advent.

The conflict between the earlier and Catholic doctrine and this Chiliastic outgrowth may readily be traced in the history of the Church. It appeared in its full development, first of all, early in the apostolic age, in connection with the Church at Thessalonica. The two earliest of the Pauline Epistles—supposed to have been written in A.D. 52 and 53—are largely taken up with the exhibition and refutation of the departures from the Catholic doctrine on this subject.

After their experience at Philippi, Paul and Silas passed on through Amphipolis and Apollonia to Thessalonica. This city—now called in slightly changed form Salonica—was a great maritime city and the capital of the first division of Macedonia, and it always had a large Jewish population. As Antioch was the natural center for Christian work in Asia Minor, so Thessalonica was one of the best strategic points—if not the best—for beginning the conquest of Europe. This was recognized by Paul himself, who, inspired with the great purpose of making the empire of Christ coterminous with that of Rome, wrote, only a few months after leaving Thessalonica (1 Thess. i. 8), that “from them the word of the Lord had sounded forth like a trumpet, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place.”

The preaching that led to the expulsion of Paul and Silas from the city (see Acts xvii. 1-10) furnishes the key to the Epistles written a little later. It was the doctrine of the Kingdom of God. The accusation brought against them was that they were proclaiming another King than Cæsar (Acts xvii. 7). In writing to them Paul accordingly reminds them of his exhortations and entreaties, that they should “walk worthy of God who called them to his Kingdom and Glory” (1 Thess. ii. 12), and addresses them as those who had “suffered affliction for the sake of that Kingdom” (2 Thess. i. 5). Christ’s Second Coming had evidently been a chief topic of Paul’s preaching to them.

The brevity of the Apostle’s stay in the city gave little opportunity for instructing and grounding the Christians, chiefly Gentiles, in the Christian system; but they appear to have continued stedfast in the faith in the severe persecutions and afflictions that followed (1 Thess. ii. 14; iii. 3; 2 Thess. i. 4). Nevertheless there were some peculiar aspects of the doctrine of the Second Coming toward which their trials seemed naturally to push them. Looking upon it as the glorious coming of the Lord for deliverance (1 Thess. i. 10), some came to believe in the imminency, if not the immediacy, of the Second Advent; and so gave up laboring for their own support, became burdensome to the brethren, and encouraged irregularities by their mode of life. Moreover, there arose a perplexity about the case of those who should fall asleep before the Second Coming.

This state of things led Paul, toward the close of 53 A.D., to write from Athens his First Epistle to the Thessalonians, to give specific instruction regarding these points. His main theme is the consolation from the hope of the Second Coming of the Lord. The leading words in the Epistle (as in 2 Thessalonians) are Parousia (advent, or appearing) and Affliction. The prominence in it of the coming of the Lord is shown by the fact that each chapter rises to and rests in that Coming as its conclusion (see ch. i. 10; ii. 20; iii. 13; iv. 17, 18; v. 23).

The Second Epistle was written to the Thessalonians in A.D. 53, from Corinth. The former letter had produced salutary results, on which the Apostle congratulates them; but their manifold tribulations on account of the faith had caused the opinion that the Lord’s coming would take place immediately, to gain ground rapidly among them. This hope was fostered by some among them who claimed to have the “spirit of prophecy,” and it was also thought to be favored by Paul’s own teachings (2 Thess. ii. 2). In consequence of this, the habits of idleness and irregularity had increased. Moreover, the false Jewish teachers were beginning to lead the Thessalonian Christians to look upon “the Day of the Lord,” according to the Old-Testament view (Isa. xiii.; Joel ii.; Amos v. 18), as a Day of Judgment, rather than of deliverance and glory. The aim of the Second Epistle is to meet the new needs that had arisen.

It will be seen from this outline view that the Epistles to the Thessalonians bear a relation to the Second Advent of Christ similar to that of the Book of Daniel to his First Advent. They were the guidebook for that age and for the Church of the after-ages. In conjunction with the teaching of our Lord Himself in Matt. xxiv., their instructions and directions would appear to be sufficiently full and explicit. For the time being the Chiliastic views seem to have disappeared from the Church, and the Catholic doctrine to have held full sway.

A new development of Chiliasm took place toward the close of the second century. It resulted from the persecuting hand of the government being laid heavily upon the Church.

It is not necessary here to enter into the causes of the persecutions by the Romans. It is enough to note that the ideas of religious freedom in the modern world are quite alien to those of the ancient world. There were none but state religions and national gods. Cicero lays down as the fundamental maxim of legislation in ancient Romanism, that “no man shall have for himself particular gods of his own; no man shall worship by himself any new or foreign gods, unless they are recognized by the public laws.” And so Christianity came necessarily into collision with the laws of the state.

The bloody persecutions, from the last half of the second century onward, were the inevitable outcome of this natural and essential antagonism; but even in the opening half of the second century the Christians were subjected to sore trials such as those from which the Thessalonians suffered. In passing through these, their minds seem to have turned again, says Neander, to “the idea of the millennial reign, which the Messiah was to set up on earth.… In the midst of persecutions, it was a solace and support to the Christians to anticipate that even upon this earth, the scene of their sufferings, the Church was destined to triumph in its perfected and glorified state.” In some regions this view took on a more spiritual form; while in others, as in Phrygia, the natural home of a sensual, enthusiastic religious spirit, “Chiliasm appeared in its crass and grossly conceived form in which the earthly Jewish mind had depicted it.”

Among the Apostolic Fathers, in the second century, the doctrine appears in the writings of Barnabas, Hernias, and Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, only, the last named teaching it in its grossest form. As Dr. Shedd has said (“History of Christian Doctrine,” vol. ii., p. 390): “There are no traces of Chiliasm in the writings of Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, Tatian, Athenagorus, and Theophilus of Antioch.” He adds: “The inference from these facts, then, is that this tenet was not the received faith of the Church certainly down to the year 150. It was held only by individuals.” Among the really masterful scholars, ecclesiastics, and theologians, it had not a single advocate. That it was not the faith of the Apostolic Church is further evident from the fact that it was not embodied in the so-called Apostles’ Creed, which is “undoubtedly the substance of the short confessions of faith which the catechumens of the Apostolic Church were accustomed to make upon entering the Church.”

The period from 150 A.D. to 250 has been called “the blooming age of Millenarianism.” It was in this period of bitter and increased persecution that Irenæus and Tertullian came forward as its advocates, giving glowing descriptions of the millennial reign. “Antichrist, together with all the nations that side with him, will be destroyed. All earthly empires, and the Roman in particular, will be overthrown. Christ will appear, and will reign a thousand years, in corporeal presence on earth, in Jerusalem, which will be rebuilt and made the capital of His kingdom. The patriarchs, prophets, and all the pious, will be raised from the dead, and share in the felicity of this kingdom. The New Jerusalem is depicted in the most splendid colors” (Shedd, “History of Christian Doctrine,” vol. ii.. p. 390).

But even Irenæus and Tertullian, in presenting “brief synoptical statements of the authorized faith of the Church,” in their writings against heretics, make no mention of the Millenarian tenet as belonging to that faith.

The third century, chiefly in its first half, witnessed the strenuous discussion that seems practically to have brought to an end, for the time at least, the tendency in the Church to accept the Chiliastic doctrine. This was conducted in the Alexandrian School, under the lead of three great teachers, Clement of Alexandria, Origen his pupil, and Dionysius the pupil of Origen. They did not reject the Apocalypse, but addressed themselves to opposing the grossly literal interpretations put upon it by the Chiliasts.

The method adopted by Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria is of peculiar interest, as showing what may be accomplished by candid Christian discussion. Neander gives a somewhat detailed account of his course (“Church History,” vol. i., p. 452). Nepos, a pious Egyptian bishop belonging to the region of Arsinoë, and who was a devoted friend of the sensual Chiliasm, wrote a book against the Alexandrian school, entitled “A Refutation of the Allegorists.” “The book seems to have found great favor with the clergy and laity in the above-mentioned district. Great mysteries and disclosures of future events were supposed to be found here; and many engaged with more zeal in the study of the book and theory of Nepos than in that of the Bible and its doctrines.” So zealous did his disciples become for this tenet that they brought the charge of heresy against all who refused to accept it. Whole churches separated themselves from their communion with the mother-church at Alexandria. After the death of Nepos, a country priest, Coracion, took the leadership of this party.

Neander gives an interesting account of the way in which, by instruction and discussion, the good and wise Bishop of Alexandria, Dionysius, led Coracion back to the faith. This happened in the year 255.

“Having restored the unity of faith among his own churches,” Dionysius wrote his work on the Promises, for the instruction of the churches. By the opening of the fourth century Chiliasm seems to have almost disappeared from the Church, as is shown by the statements of Eusebius, the church historian. Describing the writings of Papias, Eusebius remarks that they contain “matters rather too fabulous,” among which he enumerates the opinion of Papias that “there would be a certain millennium after the resurrection, and that there would be a corporeal reign of Christ on this very earth.” The return to the Catholic doctrine on the subject seems therefore to have been quite general before the year 400.

The history of the Chiliastic doctrine from the opening of the fifth century may be briefly summarized, since its manifestations have been only sporadic and temporary.

As the tenth century drew to a close there arose “an undefined fear and expectation among the masses that the year 1000 would witness the advent of the Lord,” but this passed away with the century.

At the time of the Reformation, the doctrine was revived by the fanatical Anabaptists, Münzer and his followers, who attempted to put down all temporal sovereignty and to establish the kingdom of the saints with fire and sword. They were, however, vigorously opposed by Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, and the other great reformers, and their military forces were defeated and crushed and their leaders slain at Mühlhausen in 1525 and at Munster in 1535. Leading symbols of the Reformation period strongly condemn Chiliasm, e.g., the Augsburg Confession, the Belgic Confession, and the English Confession of Edward VI.

The history of the doctrine during the nineteenth century is well summarized by Dr. Shedd:

“During the present century, individual minds in England and America, and upon the Continent of Europe, have attempted to revive the theory—in some instances in union with an intelligent and earnest orthodoxy, in others in connection with an uneducated and somewhat fanatical pietism. The first class is represented by Delitzsch and Auberlen in Germany, and by Cumming, Elliott, and Bonar in Great Britain; the second class by the so-called Adventists and Millerites in the United States.”

The Millerite movement, started in 1831 by William Miller, an American, who predicted that Christ’s Second Coming and the end of the world would take place in 1843, received what was practically its death-blow in the failure of the prediction to meet with accomplishment at the appointed time. Substantially the same classes of people are, however, to be found among the Adventists, or Second Adventists, of the present time, including a considerable number of immigrant foreigners, especially Scandinavians. Some of these hold to the doctrine of the annihilation of the wicked and to that of the sleep of the dead until the resurrection. The approach of the twentieth century seems to have given an impulse to the Adventist movement, altho it has not changed the character or quality of its advocates.

The survey thus made of the history of the Church, ancient, medieval, and modern, brings out the fact that the Catholic doctrine, as already outlined, has always been the Church doctrine. The Chiliastic views based upon the literal interpretation of the Scriptures bearing upon the subject have never been generally accepted. The facts, as summarized by Dr. Shedd (“History of Christian Doctrine,” vol. ii., p. 398), are as follows:

“1. That Millenarianism was never the ecumenical faith of the Church and never entered as an article into any of the creeds.

“2. That Millenarianism has been the opinion of individuals and parties only—some of whom have stood in agreement with the Catholic faith, and some in opposition to it.”

REASONS FOR THE BELIEF THAT CHRIST MAY COME WITHIN THE NEXT TWENTY YEARS

By ARTHUR T. PIERSON, D.D.

Is the day of Christ near at hand?

This question is attracting much attention as this new century begins, and wise men are watching for the morning star, which is the herald of the new dawn.

Imminence is a word used for the union of the certainty of an event with the uncertainty of its time. One text suffices to show that such imminence is, in the Scripture, characteristic of the Lord’s return: “Be ye also ready; for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of Man cometh” (Matt, xxiv. 44). Such an exhortation excludes mere argument. The certainty of the event is assured, for “the Son of Man cometh;” the uncertainty of the time is conceded, for it is “in an hour that ye think not” or as verse 36 adds, “of that day and hour knoweth no man.”

In a broader sense, the word imminent is used to express the idea that the event is impending—nigh at hand. True, it may be unwise to attempt to fix the very “day and hour,” since these are declared to lie among the divine secrets. Yet it may be both possible and proper to observe carefully the signs which are to precede or accompany Christ’s reappearing, and even the mistakes of those who have made erroneous calculations as to the time may serve only to narrow the circle within which the truth is to be found. We shall therefore inquire briefly whether there is any reason to look for the speedy reappearing of the Son of Man, and, without committing ourselves to all the opinions which follow, we may state the grounds on which such conclusions have been reached by many devout students of the subject.

The appeal must, of course, be to the Holy Oracles, if we are to get any safe response. Seven signs hinted at in the Word of God may be selected, as prominent:

(1) A widespread witness to Christ, with (2) a widespread decline in godliness. (3) A marked movement among the Jews, with (4) the fulness of the Gentiles. (5) A singularly unresting state of society, with (6) a daring development of iniquity and (7) a confident sense of false security. These seven indications must be studied in the light of seven conspicuous passages of Scripture, such as Matt, xxiv., Luke xxi., Rom. xi., 2 Thess. ii., 2 Peter iii., 2 Tim. iii., and Jude.

It may be well to add that, if such conclusion hung upon any one of these signs alone, it might be more than doubtful; but, when all these unite, they serve as far safer guides; as a cable may be unbreakable, any one of whose separate strands would easily part under severe tension.

Thoughtful observers of events, who are at the same time prayerful students of Scripture, have come to feel that there is a manifold and remarkable preparation for the “Parousia” or personal coming of Christ; and that the existing state of both the church and the world seems to demand His coming as the only solution of the problems of prophecy and of history.

The present drift of society is toward anarchy, a drift that has been peculiarly rapid during the last quarter-century. Socialism, communism, nihilism, and the hot battle between capital and labor, monopoly and poverty, are the dominant facts and forces in this war, now being waged, with increasing violence and desperateness, against all government. There is also a strong drift in the church toward apostasy. Witness the advance of Romanism, ritualism, and rationalism, even in Protestant churches and communities. In society at large there is a corresponding advance of materialism, agnosticism, and infidelity; and the polite disguises of science, culture, and criticism do not hide the true features and forms which they clothe, but can not conceal.