ord; and here, as
everywhere else, an unwise teacher will seek to hide the answer. Yet how
infinitely better to state it fully, and then show that the evasion has
no form at all; but, on the contrary, powerfully argues the
inconsistency and incapacity of those who urge it. For instance, I
remember Boulanger, a French infidel, whose work was duly translated by
a Scotchman, answers it thus: What is there miraculous in all this? he
demands. Listen to me, and I will show you in two minutes that it rests
upon mere show and pure delusion. How is it, why is it, that the Jews
have remained a separate people? Simply from their usages, in the first
place; but, secondly, still more from the fact that these usages, which
with other peoples exist also in some representative shape, with _them_
modify themselves, shift, alter, adapt themselves to the climate or to
the humour or accidents of life amongst those amidst whom chance has
thrown them; whereas amongst the Jews every custom, the most trivial, is
also part of their legislation; and their legislation is also their
religion. (Boulanger, by the way, is far from expressing that objection
so clearly as I have here done; but this is his drift and purpose, so
far as he knew how to express it.) Take any other people--Isaurians,
Athenians, Romans, Corinthians--doubtless all these and many others have
transmitted their blood down to our ages, and are now living amongst us
by representation. But why do we not perceive this? Why do the Athenians
seem to have perished utterly? Simply for this reason: they were a
plastic, yielding, unobstinate race. An Athenian lived in a port of
Italy, married an Italian woman; thence threw out lines of descent to
Milan, thence to Paris; and because his Attic usages were all local,
epichorial, and tied to a particular mythology which has given way, or
to a superstition which is defunct, or to a patriotic remembrance which
has vanished with the land and the sympathy that supported it; hence,
and upon other similar arguments, the Athenian has long since melted
into the mass with which he was intermixed; he was a unit attached to a
vast overpowering number from another source, and into that number he
has long since been absorbed; he was a drop in a vast ocean, and long
ago he has been confounded with the waters that did not differ, except
numerically, from his own. But the Jews are an obstinate, bigoted
people; and they have maintained their separation, not by a