to take such measures as
shall bring the divine service into consonance with the will of the
Almighty, as explained to us in the law and the prophets?" To the force
of this reasoning the Jews as a body remain impervious, and though time
has mitigated the angry feeling which the Reformers created, as Reformers
always do, and no longer do the chief men of the orthodox Jews issue
warnings against the Reformers, who from the first professed their love
to the old synagogues and their desire to continue connected with them in
works of charity, yet the new community is by no means cordially received
and sanctioned by the old. Nor can we expect it to be otherwise. The
more men have in common, the smaller is the difference between them, the
more, often, is the ill-will with which they regard each other. The eye
of the true theologian is of a wonderfully magnifying character. As he
looks, a little rivulet expands into an impassable gulf, and a molehill
becomes a mountain. What bitter things have been said, what fierce
passions have been aroused, what martyrs have had to die and survivors to
weep, because of what seemed to cool observers trifles light as air!

Yet, after all, there is a danger. If rationalist principles prevail,
and the Old Testament be a series of myths or allegories, why still
retain the ritualist law in all its strictness? and if that goes the
whole system goes. Pious Jews find all society against them; its spirit,
its customs, its literature, all hostile, if not to their nation, at any
rate to their faith. In too many cases they perceive that those who
forsake the religion of their forefathers are but little the better for
doing so. They find that those who begin by laughing at rabbinical
absurdities end by despising the Word of God. A Hebrew infidel, an
infidel among the Israelites, to whom pertaineth the adoption and the
glory and the covenants, writes a Jewish author already quoted, "is
indeed a frightful and portentous phenomenon," and thus the more
sensitive and conservative amongst them shrink from in any way modifying
their ritual in accordance with what is termed the spirit of the age.
Christians have no idea of the earnestness of spirit, of the striving
after conformity to the law of God, of the devout Jew, or of the great
and grand truths which he extracts from observances or forms in which
they can see no meaning. The Jew is fond of pleasure, fond of show, fond
of jewellery and gorgeous