look now,
in view of the teachings of such men as Gobineau and various of his
successors, that the Aryans are the highest and best people in the
world and that the Germans are the very best of all the Aryans, that
it is Germany that has come to consider itself the chosen people, the
elite, superior race. But certainly Germany is not very Christian. It
was only converted in the thirteenth century, and Luther soon threw
off the fully developed Christianity of Rome. Since then we have had
the Tuebingen School, that resolved everything into myth, and the very
many other negative points of view expressed in Nietzsche's supremest
condemnation of Jesus as a wretched degenerate, while Wagner's
deliberate slogan was, "_Das Deutschtum muss das Christentum siegen_."

_The Rapprochement of Jew and Gentile in America_

I wonder if the time is not near at hand when your people will
reconstruct your conceptions so much as to recognize Jesus as a
typical, golden, Jewish youth, worthy of being an ideal for young men.
We certainly do have in his life as now interpreted exactly what youth
needs above all things,--ambition, enthusiasm, idealism, all of them
absorbing, all of them diverting physical and sensuous energy into the
very highest culture sphere, sublimating desire, and making us
understand that youth is not complete without a great effort at
achievement. The very essence of youth is excitement. There must be
tension, strain, a tiptoe attitude, a strong "Excelsior"-like ambition
to climb, and a corresponding horror of inferiority, _Miderwertigkeit_.
Youth is an age of idealism, and the tension decade of adolescence
needs a regimen and an idealization all its own, to set back-fires to
temptation. Instead of the current altogether too plain talk on sex
hygiene and teaching, we must realize that every enthusiasm or real
interest, be it in the multiplication table or in literature, debate,
athletics, is an alternative. It reduces temptation and stores up
energy as the great reservoirs in the middle west store up the floods
that come down from the mountains, so that they shall irrigate and not
devastate the land. Jesus, in the new interpretation of Holzmann and
Baumann, stands for this kind of enthusiasm.

I cannot but wonder, therefore, whether, in view of these new
conceptions, Jew and Gentile are not going to meet in this country and
even agree about Jesus. It is difficult at least to see which of us
would change most if there