lover and sweetheart, are
covered by law, fixed, immovable. The learned men of Judah are men
learned in the Law, not learned in the science of life, and commonsense.
When these learned men meet they argue for six days and nights together
as to interpretations of the Law concerning whether it is right to make
a fire in your cook-stove on the Sabbath if a Christian is starving for
food on your doorstep, or what will become of you if you eat pork to
save your life.

Rational Jews are those who do what they think is right, but Orthodox
Jews are those who do what the Law prescribes. When Jesus plucked the
ears of corn on the Sabbath day, he proved himself a Rational Jew--he
set his own opinion higher than Law and thereby made himself an outcast.
Jewish Law provides curdling curses for just such offenses.

Plato's Republic was a scheme of life regulated absolutely by law; every
contingency was provided for. And Plato's plan was founded on the
hypothesis that it is the duty of wise men to do the thinking and
regulate the conduct of those who are supposed not to be wise enough to
think and to act for themselves. But Plato's idea lacked the "Thus saith
the Lord," with which Moses and Aaron enforced their edicts. So Plato's
Republic is still on paper, for no set of rules minutely regulating
conduct has ever been enforced except as the ruler made his subjects
believe he received his instructions direct from God.

Yet all the Jewish Laws are founded with an eye to a sanitary and
hygienic good--they are built on the basis of expediency. And that rule
of the Gemara which provides that if you have gravy on the table, you
can not also have butter, without sin, seems more of a move in the
direction of economics than a matter of ethics. Laws are good for the
people who believe that a blind obedience to a good thing is better than
to work your way alone and find out for yourself what is best and
right. The Jewish Law is based, like all religious codes, on the
assumption that man by nature is vile, and really prefers wrong to
right.

The thought that all men prefer the good, and think at the moment they
are doing what is best, no matter what they do, was first sharply and
clearly expressed by Spinoza. Truth, he said, could only be reached
through freedom--a man must even have the privilege of thinking wrong so
long as his actions do not jeopardize the life and immediate safety of
others.

For a people whose every act is governed by f