ose. In particular,
it owes a debt which it can never liquidate to what was at once the
cause and the result of his over-seriousness,--to his lack of any
sense of humour,--a negative quality which allowed his practical
logic to run its course without let or hindrance, and prevented
the "brakes" of common-sense from acting when he found himself, in
his very zeal for the Law, descending an inclined plane into an
unfathomable abyss of turpitude and folly. The man (or people) who is
able, of his own experience, to tell the rest of mankind what a given
scheme of life really means and is really worth, owing to his having
offered himself as the _corpus vile_ for the required experiment, is
one of the greatest benefactors of the human race. Had Israel been
less sincere or less courageous, we might never have known what
deadly fallacies lurk in the seemingly harmless dualism of popular
thought.

* * * * *

But the West, it will be said, is Christian, not Jewish. Is it
Christian? If the word "Christian" connotes acceptance of the
teaching as well as devotion to the person of Christ, it is scarcely
applicable either to the official or to the popular religion of
the West. For Christ, the stern denouncer of the Pharisees, was
the whole-hearted enemy of legalism; and the legal conception of
salvation through mechanical obedience still dominates the religion
and life of Christendom.

The Jewish Law tried to cover, and tended more and more to cover, the
whole of human life. It is true that it controlled the details rather
than the totality of life; but the reason why it dealt with life,
detail by detail, was that its exponents, owing to their spiritual
purblindness, were unable to see the wood for the trees. In
Christendom, while the doctrine of salvation through mechanical
obedience was retained, the authority of a Church was substituted
for that of a Code of Law. The growth of the idea of Humanity, as
opposed to that of mere nationality, made this necessary. As the
former idea began to compete with the latter, the need for a
divinely-commissioned society which should declare the will and
communicate the grace of God, not to one nation only but to all men
who were willing to hearken and obey,--and whose action, as a channel
of intercourse between God and Man, should be continuous rather
than spasmodic,--began to make itself felt. A Code of Law might
conceivably suffice to regulate the life of one sm