humiliation, but do not humiliate others; who bear insult, but do not
inflict it on others; and who endure a life of martyrdom in pure love of
God."(1197)

Indeed, the medieval Jew accepted his sad lot in this spirit of
resignation. But the modern Jew is in a different situation. In the mighty
effort of our age for higher truth, broader love and larger justice, he
beholds the nearing of the prophetic goal of a united humanity, based on
the belief in God, the King and Father of all. Accordingly, modern Judaism
proclaims more insistently than ever that the Jewish people is the Servant
of the Lord, the suffering Messiah of the nations, who offered his life as
an atoning sacrifice for humanity and furnished his blood as the cement
with which to build the divine kingdom of truth and justice. Indeed, the
cosmopolitan spirit of the Jew is the one element needed for the
universality of culture. On the other hand, the world at large is to-day
learning more and more to regard the superb loyalty of the Jew to his
ancestral faith with greater fairness and admiration and to accord larger
appreciation to him and his religion. Once the flood of hatred,
dissension, and prejudice that brought such untold havoc shall have
disappeared from the earth; once religion emerges from the nebulous
atmosphere of other-worldliness, and directs its longing for God toward a
life of godliness on earth in the spirit of the ancient prophets, then the
historic mission of the Jew will also be better understood. Israel, the
hunted dove, which found no resting-place for the sole of its foot during
the flood of sin and persecution, will then appear with the olive-branch
of peace for all humanity, to open the hearts of men that all may enter
the covenant with the universal Father. Then, and not till then, will the
shame of those thousands of years be rolled away, when the world will
recognize that not _a_ Jew, but _the_ Jew has been the suffering Messiah,
and that he was sent forth to be the savior of the nations.

Chapter LIII. The Messianic Hope

1. Recent investigators have brought to light many a vision of an era of
heavenly bliss brought about by some powerful ruler, voiced in hoary
antiquity by seer or singer in addressing the royal masters of Babylon or
Egypt.(1198) But no word in the entire vocabulary of ancient poetry or
prose can so touch the deeper chords of the heart, and so voice the
highest hopes of mankind, as does the name _Messiah_ (