our national life, is not hatred of
aught but wrong. The Master has said, an offence against man is worse
than an offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the
breasts of Jews, who are children of the ignorant and oppressed--what
wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our
national life was a growing light. Let the central fire be kindled
again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our
race will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a place for
saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic
where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the
old, purified and enriched by the experience our greatest sons have
gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?--only two centuries
since a vessel carried over the ocean the beginning of the great North
American nation. The people grew like meeting waters--they were various
in habit and sect--there came a time, a century ago, when they needed a
polity, and there were heroes of peace among them. What had they to
form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a
better? Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes. They have the
memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a
better. A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art
and wisdom. So will a new Judaea, poised between East and West--a
covenant of reconciliation. Will any say, the prophetic vision of your
race has been hopelessly mixed with folly and bigotry: the angel of
progress has no message for Judaism--it is a half-buried city for the
paid workers to lay open--the waters are rushing by it as a forsaken
field? I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human
choice. The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose
them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the
planting of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed and rushed onward:
the Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and
make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of
corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and
resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or
purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle
of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the
blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future
of