Part 13

In Dr. Ingleby’s just published Essays there is a very pertinent story from Saint Augustine concerning this contagion of the emotion of cruelty. A certain Alypius detested, on report, the spectacle of the Gladiators, but was induced to enter the amphitheatre, protesting that he would not look at the show: “So soon as he saw the blood,” says Saint Augustine, “he therewith drank down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in pleasure unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime; nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came into.”—_Saint Augustine’s Confessions_, Bk. vi., c. 8. Similar perversions occur at all brutal exhibitions. A friend sends me the following instance from his own knowledge. “A party of English people went to the Bull Ring of San Sebastian. When the first horse was ripped up and his entrails trailed on the ground, a young lady of the party burst into tears and insisted on going away. Her brothers compelled her to remain; and a number of horses were then mutilated and killed before her eyes. Long before the end of the spectacle the girl was as excited and delighted as any Spaniard in the assembly.”

Footnote 12:

Readers of that singular book, “St. Bernard’s” (Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., 1887, new edition 1888), and its sequel, “Dying Scientifically,” may possibly entertain doubts on this subject.

Footnote 13:

“C’est pourquoi, seul dans mon siècle, j’ai sû comprendre Jésus Christ et St. François d’Assise.”—_M. Renan._

Footnote 14:

The heads of this party in England are the venerable Rabbi Nathan Adler and his son and colleague, Rev. Herman Adler, who hold a kind of Patriarchate over all English Orthodox Jews. The principal synagogue of this party (to which the Rothschild family hereditarily belongs, also the Cohens, Sir G. Jessel, etc.) is in Great Portland Street. The _Eglise mère_ is in the City, and there are many other synagogues belonging to it scattered over London and England. The Portuguese branch of the Orthodox party (the most rigidly Orthodox of all), to which Sir Moses Montefiore belonged, has its chief synagogue in Bevis Marks. The late distinguished Rabbi Artom, brother of Cavour’s private secretary, was minister of this synagogue.

Footnote 15:

The Reformed Jews, among whom Sir Julian Goldsmid and Mr. F. D. Mocatta hold distinguished places, have only one synagogue in London, that in Berkeley Street. The minister of this wealthy and important congregation is the Rev. D. Marks. A special liturgy, differing chiefly from the Orthodox by omissions of Talmudic passages, is in use in this synagogue.

Footnote 16:

Professor Goldwin Smith, in the _Nineteenth Century_.

Footnote 17:

It will be noticed that nothing can be further apart than these ideas of a Reformed Judaism from those put forward by George Eliot in “Daniel Deronda.” Equally remote are they from the crude endeavor to return to a supposed primitive Judaism through the “worship of the letter” of the Old Testament, which was hailed some years ago with premature satisfaction by a certain school of Protestant Christians. See the interesting “History of the Karaite Jews,” by the Rev. W. H. Rule, D.D., 1870.

Footnote 18:

As an example of this, I can mention the following fact. All the Jewish journals in Germany (amounting to nine out of ten of all the newspapers in the country) support a certain cruel practice. And why? It has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with finance, nothing to do with any matter wherein Jews have a different interest from other people. The key to this mystery is simply that seven or eight of the most guilty persons are Jews. This “clandestine manipulation of the press,” and tribe-union for purposes disconnected with tribal interests, constitutes a _cabal_, and necessarily creates antagonism and disgust. Nothing of this kind can be laid at the door of English Jews, and it is much to be wished that they would expostulate with their brethren on its imbittering effects abroad.

Footnote 19:

I cannot but think that too much has been made, particularly under the influence of the modern mania for “heredity,” of the exceptional character of the Jewish race. Of course, the Jews are a most remarkable people, so vigorous physically as to be able to colonize either India or Greenland, and after a thousand years of Ghetto existence to remain (to the confusion of all sanitation-mongers) the healthiest race in Europe. On the mental side, their multifarious gifts and their indomitable sturdiness are no less admirable. But their fidelity to their race and religion is not unmatched. Not to speak of the miserable Gypsies, the Parsees offer a more singular spectacle; for their members have always been a handful compared to the Jews (not above 150,000 at the utmost), and during the ten ages of their exile they have exhibited a spirit of concession towards the customs of their neighbors which has left the actual dogmas of their religion the sole bond of their national integrity. They worshipped the One good God under the law of Zoroaster three, perhaps four, millenniums ago, and they worship Him faithfully still, though a mere remnant of a race, dwelling in the midst of idolaters, and with no distinctive badgelike circumcision, no haughty disdain of “Gentile” nations, no hope of a restoration to their own land. Their priests have been illiterate and despised, not erudite and honored rabbis. Their sacred books have twice become obsolete in language, and incomprehensible both to clergy and laity. Their Prophet has faded into an abstraction. But their faith in Ahura-Mazda, the “Wise Creator,” the “Rich in Love,” remains as clear to-day among them as when it first rose upon the Bactrian plains in the morning of the world. The virtues of truth, chastity, industry, and beneficence inculcated by the Zend-Avesta, and attributed by the Greek historians to their ancestors of the age of Cyrus, are still noticeable among them in marked contrast to their Hindu neighbors; as are likewise their muscular strength and hardy frames. Even as regards their commercial aptitudes, the Parsees offer a singular parallel to the Jews. The _Times_ remarked some years ago that out of the 150,000 Parsees there were an incredible number of very wealthy men, and six were actual millionaires. One of the last, Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy, gave away in his lifetime the sum of £700,000 sterling in charities to men of every religion.

Footnote 20:

The congregations use Prayer-books with the vernacular in parallel columns.

Footnote 21:

I refer especially to the magnificent services for the Day of Atonement as used in the Reformed Synagogue. There are also many noble prayers in the collection of Sabbath and other services for various festivals. The whole liturgy is majestic, though somewhat deficient as regards the expression of spiritual aspiration.

Footnote 22:

So rapidly moves the world that, since this Essay was first published, a whole systematic work of charity of this specially Christian character has been established by benevolent Jewish ladies in London. I have before me the “Report of the Jewish Ladies’ Association for Prevention and Rescue Work” for 1886–87, printed for private circulation. The president of the association is Lady Rothschild; the honorable secretaries, Mrs. Cyril Flower and Mrs. J. L. Jacobs. Nothing can seem more wisely kind and merciful than the whole scheme as here detailed. We are told that the poor Jewish girls reclaimed from a life of vice (into which only of late years have many been known to fall) “are taught not only to follow the observances of their faith, but also to lead pure and useful lives; and no pains will be spared to make them better women as well as capable earners of their own livelihood.... The committee feel convinced they will not be allowed to fail in their strenuous endeavor to bring back those who are, as it were, sunk in moral death, to a _new life_.”

Footnote 23:

See this affectingly brought out in that charming book, “The Jews of Barnow.”

Footnote 24:

A clever book, exhibiting great acquaintance with current phases of opinion, appeared a few years ago, offering by its title some promise of dealing with the case of the Christian Theists of whom I am speaking. The author proposes to discuss “Natural Religion,” but he shortly proceeds to describe a great many things which, in the common language of mankind, are not _religious_ at all,—scientific ardor, artistic taste, or mere recognition of the physical order of the universe,—and to urge that these, or nothing, must constitute the religion of the future. The Israelites who had gazed up in awe and wonder at the rolling clouds on Sinai, from whence came the thunders and voices, and the stern and holy Law, and were immediately afterwards called on to worship a miserable little image of a calf, and told, “These be Thy Gods, O Israel!” might, one would think, have felt the same sense of bathos which we experience when we are solemnly assured that these sciences and arts _are_ henceforth our “Religion.” A drowning man proverbially catches at straws, and people who feel themselves sinking in the ocean of Atheism seize on every spar which comes under their hands, and cry, “We may float yet awhile by this.” No one can blame them for trying to do so; but it is rather hard to expect all the world to recognize as an ironclad the hencoop on which they sit astride.

Among the “Natural Religions,” as he is pleased to call them, of which he has brought us intelligence (some of which are not natural, and none of which are properly Religions), the author of this book has disdained to mention that ancient but ever new form of opinion which in former days went by the name of Natural Religion. The words were not happily selected, and belong indeed to an archaic theological terminology. But they were understood by everybody to mean, _not_ the recognition of the virtues of physical science, nor admiration of fine scenery, nor enthusiasm for art, nor recognition of natural laws; for all these things had names of their own. But it was understood to mean the recognition and worship of a super-mundane, intelligent, and righteous _Person_,—in other words, of GOD. It contemplated God “mainly above Nature,” _not_, as the author of this book says must henceforward be done, “mainly in Nature” (“Natural Religion,” p. 160). For admirable pictures, however, of the modern Artist, who would rather have painted a good picture than have done his duty, and of the modern Man of Science who, “consumed by the passion of research,” finds “right and wrong become meaningless words,” see p. 120.

Footnote 25:

A Chief of the Police Force has informed me that arrests of desperadoes are always made, if practicable, at about four A.M.; that hour being found by experience to be the one when animal courage is at its lowest ebb and resistance to be least apprehended.

Footnote 26:

I have heard this peculiar but common form of feminine affliction classified as the “Bad Husband Headache.”

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed. 3. Footnotes were re-indexed using numbers and collected together at the end of the last chapter. 4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.