perhaps even ungenerous. The inner logic of its creed, as the contention runs, condemned Judaism to end in pessimism. Had this not happened, Christianity would not have been required "to transcend and include " its predecessor. This view is unjust, because it credits all modern speculative advance to one side, and debits all ancient defect in philosophic criticism to the other. Further, it involves certain misconceptions of Judaism as a religious phenomenon. Forgetting the wide variations within the religion itself, for example, writers are to be found who maintain that the impervious selfhood of Yahveh is its single distinguishing characteristic. But the crucial statement in Deuteronomy is only one. aspect of the whole truth. "Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the Lord [Yahveh] he is God in the heaven above, and upon the earth beneath; there is none else." 1 So far as we are now aware, Israel's faith, as Renan rightly insists, always differed from that of related tribes, and it passed, as Kuenen and others have shown, into a highly developed type of monotheism. Yet, it must never be forgotten that there was a primitive "monolatry," and that “ethical monotheism" did not end Jewish religious progress. This monotheism itself, moreover, is "religious," not "metaphysical." The faith of Israel, in other words, can be taken as a type of semi-pessimistic religion only if a series of tacit assumptions be admitted without dispute. These may be stated as follows: Yahveh is alleged to be transcendent-set apart from man and unapproachable. He is the one magnificent personality, and by comparison, the human, like the natural, is dwarfed into utter insignificance. This separation of 1 Chap. iv. 39. 2 Alttestament. Theologie, Schultz, pp. 166 sq.

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the divine from the earthly accounts for the gloomy features of Judaism, and takes shape in a hopeless acquiescence, such as is exemplified in Ecclesiastes. Its burden is, "Know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment." Once more, it is held that "the Jew is God's servant, who labours to deserve eternal life by his conformity to the law." Or, as Wellhausen has it, "the sum of the means became the end; through the Torah God was forgotten." Legalism erected a barrier between Yahveh and his people which never could be overpassed, and men either turned to pharisaism or were thrown back on a self-centred mysticism. If these assumptions and their several implications be true, then Judaism may fairly be cited as the eminent example of a religion destined for pessimism.

But, even taking the religion of the Jews only in its middle and later periods,—only in its "ethical monotheism," and in its "legalism and formalism which entangle all life in a network of meaningless prescriptions,"”—and putting the matter very summarily, it may be affirmed, first, that prophetic ideals are by no means so exclusively subjective as has been alleged. The Yahvehistic notion of righteousness, as set forth by Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah, has little in it of that "change of heart" which subjectivism demands. Not the personal relation of the believer to his God, but the sin of a whole nationality, receives attention. Social defects, effete institutions, and the like objective considerations, partly hold the field. Even a century later, when the ethical monotheism was at its height, the same continues true in the main. At a future time, the contention of the prophets seems to be, 1 Chap. xi. 9.

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the personal element in religion will come to predominate. "In those days every one shall die for his own iniquity." The prophets, to do them justice, return from self to the world. Yahveh is elevated beyond the reach of other deities-not beyond man-because he created the world, and because he is the immanent originator of all the changes in Jewish history. Jeremiah's long self-communing disappears in Ezekiel and the second Isaiah, and Yahveh is conceived as a saving power who, in the course of time, will lead captivity captive. And although a diffused or world-wide force of this kind, he is represented as very near to his people, dwelling in the temple, or hovering, like a luminous cloud, over Jerusalem.

Secondly, the doctrine that Yahveh was transcendent, and therefore distant from his worshippers, implies a metaphysical interpretation of the prophetic teaching which, in the absence of any systematised account of the nature of deity, seems unwarrantable. The transcendency is traceable rather to the modern and theological reading of a naïve religious conception. God dwelt specially in the temple among his people, and in heaven, which was viewed not simply as a place but as a state or condition. Ecclesiastes excepted, there is small warrant for imagining that heaven was cut off from earth. Further, Yahveh is immanent in the universe, not only because he is the hourly superintendent of Jewish destiny, but because “he watches over and controls the sustenance and life of all plants and animals, and directs immediately all natural phenomena."2 The prophets had no formulated doctrine of a God separ1 Jeremiah xxxi. 29, 30.

2 Judaism and Christianity, C. H. Toy, p. 80.

ated from nature, and the dualism now so often emphasised is a factor which metaphysic reflects into their religious simplicity. It finds little or no support in their books, and, even admitting the evidence of Ecclesiastes, it must be said that the genius of Koheleth is too completely non-Jewish to bear the exclusive burden of so large a deduction. In fact, the particularism, in which he too partakes, contradicts the doctrine of transcendence. The Jews did not trouble about metaphysical constructions, but were amply satisfied that Yahveh had specially charged himself with their care. There was no need to elaborate a theory of his relation to them or to the world, the truth of his nearness had been so plainly manifested. The God who loves them that live in the fear—that is, the conscious acknowledgment-of his law, is more prominent than the God who slays idolators or chastises the unrighteous in Israel.

Thirdly, taking the post-exilic religion, not in one alone of its many and most perplexing aspects, but as a whole, it may be affirmed that the Jews adopted the law as a special privilege which endued them with an ideal of the good life directly revealed by Yahveh. This was the mediator between God and man. "Beloved are Israel," as rabbinical literature has it, "for unto them was given the law." It was only with the law that Yahvehism became a people's religion; and any one who reflects upon the nature of the Jew's relation to the Torah will readily understand why, to this very hour, he remains personally near to deity, and has for weary centuries been willing to endure any martyrdom rather than part with God's peculiar gift, which, as a theory would have it, did nothing but

bring the twin curses of cant and hypocrisy, or of despair and spiritual destitution.

This failure to distinguish between the problem of sin and misery, and the limits within which a solution was sought, has, further, led to an identification of socalled Judaising ideas with gloominess, both in the popular mind and in the estimation of scholars. To put it briefly, the "man in the street" has been far too ready to accept Puritanism as a Hebraic type. The traditional Scottish Sabbath, for instance, is often stigmatised as Jewish, and, assuredly, were languid heaviness a trait of all Judaistic observances, no defence of the description would be necessary. But we must bear in mind that the now rapidly passing northern observance is to its Jewish counterpart as a corpse to a living body. Puritanism may be Hebraic, but on one condition only-if the religion of the Jews be possessed of no imaginative admixture. The "plain man" has not sufficiently perceived that the genius creative of the glories of Yahveh hardly bears comparison, far less identification, with the talent descriptive of hell's horrors. Where Puritanism was gloomy, Judaism was joyous; where the Saxon was cold and austere, the Semite was sentimental and broad; where the one was calm and analytic, the other was ecstatic and imaginative. Fanaticism can only be confounded with aspiration when both are misconceived, and the popular notion of Judaism has too often led itself astray thus. On the other side also, the scholar's natural, we had almost said traditional, antithesis between Greek and Jew has been of similar effect. A monopoly of beauty, as all know, has come to be associated with the former, the unlovely being left, per contra, to the latter. Doubtless the sublimity of Yahveh did turn his people from