hat controls each new branch as it buds into existence.
The Catholic has a fixed dogma, which the church attends to, and he
neither feels called upon to make his neighbors miserable or himself
insane in hunting up new interpretations. When he does go insane on the
subject of religion, the cause, as a rule, can be traced to some real or
imagined moral delinquency, which has brought all the terrors of the
punishment of the damned forcibly and persistently to his disordered
imagination. In the insane-asylums of Cork, in Ireland, with its
overwhelming Catholic population, the ratio of inmates in regard to
creeds is as that of one Catholic to ten of the Reformed religion,
showing in the most conclusive manner the influence exerted by religion
in this direction. On the other hand, the Jew has the simplest of
religious creeds; he neither wastes useful time, robs himself of sleep,
nor becomes dyspeptic in hunting for hidden meanings in some ambiguous
scriptural phrase; he is satisfied with his creed, his dogmas are firmly
anchored, and the nature of his religion being a sort of family
congregation, he is not called upon to go out in search of proselytes,
any more than the father of an already large family feels called upon to
go out and hunt up the homeless, that he may convert his home into a
promiscuous orphan-asylum. As before remarked, his creed is of the
simplest, and there exists a complete and explicit understanding between
his God and himself. There are no mystical, hidden meanings in Scripture
for the Jew; nor does he dread any eternal, unheard-of, and inexplicable
torments. His laws are very clear, and the punishments for their
infraction very explicit. To the Jew it is a straight and well-lighted
road, as far as religion is concerned. The writer has always felt that
it took a mind that was incapable of appreciating simple truths, but
that loved to hover on that mystical border-land on the confines of
gloomy insanity that would allow its owner to seriously wander through
and behold any theological beauties in Bunyan. To the Jew there is none
of the gloomy, weird, mystical, mind-racking, ungodly theology that some
of our creeds torture the poor brains of their professors with. As the
wild Indian of the plains runs sticks through his anatomy and capers
wildly about to torture his body, so some of the creeds delight in
torturing their devotees. The Jewish religion is the one best suited to
tranquilize the mind; it is very