ord; that is My name; and My glory
will I not give to another."

Through those long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism (in
its grossest forms all around), the Jew stood up in unfaltering protest
against all. Persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in every form, were
of no avail. On the gibbet, on the rack, amid the flames, his last words
embodied the central confession of Judaism, "O Israel, the Lord _thy_ God
is one Lord." Christianity, the appointed custodier of the still more
central truth, "God is love," had to all appearance failed of its
mission; had not only merged its higher message in a theistic
presentation, dark and terroristic as that of Judaism at its dawn, but
had absorbed into its scheme, under other names, the gods many who swarm
all around it; till nowhere and never, save by some soul upborne by its
own fervour above these dense fogs and mists, could individual man meet
his God face to face, and realise that higher life of the soul which is
His free gift to all who seek it. Between this heathenised Christianity
and Judaism, the contrast was the sharpest, the contest the most
embittered and unvarying. Elsewhere we hear of times of toleration and
indulgence even for the hunted Monotheist,--in medieval Christendom,
never. The Inquisition plied its rack for the Jews with a more fiendish
zeal than even for the hated Morisco. The mob held him responsible for
plague and famine; and kings and nobles hounded the mob on to
indiscriminate massacre. The Jew lived on through it all,--lived,
multiplied, and prospered, and became more and more emphatically the Jew.
Is it too much to say that in the West in particular, where this contrast
and contest were keenest, Judaism was, during these long ages of terror
and darkness, the great conservator of the vital truth of the Divine
unity, under whatever forms science or philosophy may now attempt to
define this; and in being so, became the conservator of that thought,
without the vivifying power of which, howsoever imperfectly apprehended,
all human advance is impossible? Is it exaggerating the importance of
the Jew and his intense nationality, based on such a truth, to say that,
but for his presence, "scattered and peeled," among all nations, the
Europe we now know could not have been? And this indestructible
nationality, for whose existence miracle has been called into account--has
it no significance in the future equal to what it has had in the past?