had]; perhaps it is only a certain sadness of suffering, a certain
depth of sympathy they have evolved for all suffering and sorrow, but
at any rate it is a racial momentum which our ancestors for four
thousand years have been forging and refining in the hottest fires;"
and whether it be conceit or inspiration, he adds, "and think not that
we, to-day, in the comfortable lassitude of American life, can destroy
it." The spirit is greater than the man; the Jew may be lost or be
assimilated, but the Jewish race, not yet.

_A Spiritual Vision and Aspiration_

"BUT consider," we say very plainly to him, "the great bulk of the
Jews who seem to have lost that old spirit of religion; they pray in a
language they scarce understand as though 'they shall be heard for
their much speaking'; when you want the Hebrew Bible, moreover, it
seems you must go to the gentiles, and have not these added thereto
the sublime teachings of Christ?"

"Yes," replies our Jewish friend, with more of grief than of censure
in his voice, "and to-day the Christian world is awarding the Iron
Cross for excellence in killing. And our people it has made to loathe
the name of Christ, because it was his image that was in the hand of
the priest who led the mob to massacre at the Inquisition and at
Kishineff; though all the time it was that very persecuted people that
was itself living the principles and the martyrdom of its greatest
prophet." And he continues, and tells us brusquely how he went once to
church with a Methodist young lady and how when he was rapt in the
music of a Psalm that was being sung, she whispered giddily to him:
"Don't that remind you somewhat of the one-step music?" "No," he tells
us he replied, "it reminds me that I am the only Christian in this
audience."

And we understand in his reply he was not thinking of himself alone
(for extremist though he was, he must have known there was many
another devout listener in that audience) but rather of his race, of
those very Jews of the bended backs, "wily, unkempt," who were
elsewhere chanting that same Psalm in a language, 'tis true, they
scarce understood, yet with a spiritual zeal and forgetfulness of the
"treasures upon earth" which was the very soul of the teachings of
Christ. Could his Methodist friend, could even he, with all his
university training and American ruddiness, but have the noble spirit
of his unlettered grandmother he remembered weeping so bitterly in the
old synagogue