se of Moses.
When the Israelites had accomplished that bad work, Moses stood up and
spoke for their justification forty days and forty nights, and was not
heard. But when he mentioned the dead, he was at once heard....
Therefore as the living vine supports itself on a dead stock (i.e.
grows out of a stock dry and seemingly dead), so Israel lives and
supports itself on the fathers since they are dead[13].' The
individual Israelite, moreover, could supply his own deficiencies in
righteousness out of the treasury of merits which belonged to him in
virtue of his descent from the common fathers of the race, or the holy
progenitors of his own family. In other words the Israelites in
various ways and senses depended for salvation on having 'Abraham to
their father.' And it has already appeared sufficiently how dangerous
this belief was; and how utterly St. Paul, like Ezekiel[14] and John
{80} the Baptist before him, repudiated this idea of genealogical and
traditional merit as a ground of confidence before God.

On the other hand, this belief in the transference of merit was based
on a true idea of the organic unity of the race. The Jewish race was
bound up into one with its great progenitors; and it is these men who
are its true representatives. They show what their race can be and is
meant to be, and along what lines it is meant to move. Their election
and walk with God laid a consecration on all who came after them; as
St. Paul elsewhere says that the children of a Christian parent in a
mixed marriage are holy, i.e. have a consecration laid upon them by
their partly Christian parentage[15]. The patriarchs exhibit Israel as
God means it to be. And God, so to speak, cannot forget that every
Israelite is a child of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and that in their
faith and religion lies his possibility and his glory.

Thus stated, the idea of the 'communion of saints' in the Jewish race
is nothing else than a ground of hope, and a stimulus to recovery. And
the idea admits at once of being transferred to the catholic Israel, as
in fact its Jewish {81} parody has, at certain periods, been only too
fully and fatally transferred. I say, the true idea admits of being
transferred. We belong to the same body as the apostles and martyrs,
the virgins and saints, the Jewish patriarchs and prophets also. Their
possibilities are ours. Their God is our God for ever and ever. And
God looks on us as in one body with them. We t