a respect to the present hour."
It is for lack of this ballast that the Jews have become victims of a
fanaticism in which Christians from a mistaken idea of kindness have
frequently encouraged them. In reality nothing is more cruel than to
encourage in the minds of a nervous race the idea of persecution; true
kindness to the Jews would consist in urging them to throw off memories
of past martyrdom and to enter healthfully into the enjoyment of their
present blessings, which are the direct outcome of Christian
civilization.

Let us consider what Christianity has in reality done for the Jews. If
so much is to be said about the persecutions they have endured, what of
the extraordinary indulgence shown them as the result of Christian
respect for the Bible? For hundreds of years Christian school children
have been brought up on Old Testament history and Christian
congregations have listened sympathetically to the story of Israel's
sufferings and hopes of final restoration. All the support lent to
Zionism arose from this tradition. Christianity, then, so reviled by the
Jews, has been their greatest protection. If Christianity goes, the
whole theory that the Jews were once the Chosen People goes with it as
far as Gentiles are concerned, and the Jewish race, divested of its halo
of divine favour, will have to be judged on its own merits.

In our own country, the Chosen People theory has in fact been carried to
the point of superstition--a superstition immensely advantageous to the
Jews--which consists in interpreting the passage of Scripture containing
the promise made to Abraham, "I will bless them that bless thee, and
curse them that curseth thee," as meaning that favour shown to the
Jews--who form merely a fraction of the seed of Abraham--brings with it
peculiar blessings. In reality it would be easier to show by history
that countries and rulers who have protected the Jews have frequently
met with disaster. France banished the Jews in 1394 and again in 1615,
and did not readmit them in large numbers till 1715-19, so that they
were absent throughout the most glorious period in French history--the
_Grand Siecle_ of Louis XIV--whilst their return coincided with the
Regency, from which moment the monarchy of France may be said to have
declined. England likewise banished the Jews in 1290, and it was during
the three and a half centuries they remained in exile that she was known
as "Merrie England." The fact that their return in