order to keep up the state of purity; many trades
involve contact with substances which make purity almost impossible.
Above all, it is defiling to eat what a heathen has cooked, or to sit
at the same table with heathens. Thus the Jew was confirmed in the
belief of his own superiority to men of other races; and was
prevented by many barriers from mingling with them, or even regarding
them as brethren. His circumcision, his Sabbath, his laws of purity,
his peculiarities of diet, the absolute impossibility of his eating
along with Gentiles, kept him separate, and helped to nourish in him
the spirit of haughtiness and exclusiveness. The accepted worshipper
of Jehovah is, with the early prophets, the man who is morally sound,
who has curbed his passions and his selfish impulses; with the later
Jew that may still be the case, but there are also a number of
indispensable preliminaries of which the prophets certainly did not
dream. The man who would go up to the hill of Jehovah must be one who
has not eaten shell-fish or pork, nor opened his shop on the Sabbath,
nor touched a dead body, nor used a spoon handed to him by a Gentile
without washing it. How all this unfitted the Jewish people to be a
missionary of the pure religion, and how adverse the whole Levitical
system was to the earnest apprehension of that religion no less than
to its diffusion, the New Testament amply shows. But it kept the
people separate from the world and constant to their faith amid even
the greatest temptations and the severest persecutions, and so
enabled them to preserve the precious treasure committed to them till
the time should come when the world was to receive it from their
hands.

Heathenish Elements of Judaism.--In the system we have sketched, in
which the prophetic teaching was hardened into a ritual and a law,
there are various elements which do not belong to an advanced stage
of religious progress. While the sacrificial ritual, not outwardly
exalted above heathenism, is to some extent redeemed by the motives
which enter into it, the great system of clean and unclean rests on
no rational basis, and resembles the set of taboos, which no one can
explain, of a savage tribe; and the reduction of daily life under a
set of minute and troublesome rules, shows the devotion more than the
enlightenment of those who submitted to it. There was a necessity
that the vessel should be so narrow and so hard which was to keep the
wine of Jewish religion fr