'It cannot be'? Baruch Spinoza had not a
faithful Jewish heart, though he had sucked the life of his intellect
at the breasts of Jewish tradition. He laid bare his father's nakedness
and said, 'They who scorn him have the higher wisdom.' Yet Baruch
Spinoza confessed he saw not why Israel should not again be a chosen
nation. Who says that the history and literature of our race are dead?
Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and
Home, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe
and made the unrighteous powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug
from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver
in millions of human frames....

"I cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but
the good which promises good to all the nations. The spirit of our
religious life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of
aught but wrong. The masters have said an offence against man is worse
than an offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the
breasts of Jews who are children of the ignorant and oppressed--what
wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our
national life was a growing light. Let the central fire be kindled
again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our
race will learn to think of their sacred land not as a place for
saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic
where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the
old, purified, enriched by the experience our greatest sons have
gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?--only two centuries
since a vessel earned over the ocean the beginning of the great North
American nation. The people grew like meeting waters; they were various
in habit and sect. There came a time, a century ago, when they needed a
polity, and there were heroes of peace among them. What had they to
form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a
better? Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes. They have the
memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a
better. A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art
and wisdom. So will a new Judea, poised between East and West--a
covenant of reconciliation. Will any