uman research or the
activity of human toil. It has taken those matters for its field in
which the human mind, left to itself, could not profitably exercise
itself, or progress, if it would; it has confined its revelations to the
province of theology, only indirectly touching on other departments of
knowledge, so far as theological truth accidentally affects them; and it
has shown an equally remarkable care in preventing the introduction of
the spirit of caste or race into its constitution or administration.
Pure nationalism it abhors; its authoritative documents pointedly ignore
the distinction of Jew and Gentile, and warn us that the first often
becomes the last; while its subsequent history has illustrated this
great principle, by its awful, and absolute, and inscrutable, and
irreversible passage from country to country, as its territory and its
home. Such, then, it has been in the divine counsels, and such, too, as
realized in fact; but man has ways of his own, and, even before its
introduction into the world, the inspired announcements, which preceded
it, were distorted by the people to whom they were given, to minister to
views of a very different kind. The secularized Jews, relying on the
supernatural favours locally and temporally bestowed on themselves, fell
into the error of supposing that a conquest of the earth was reserved
for some mighty warrior of their own race, and that, in compensation of
the reverses which befell them, they were to become an imperial nation.

What a contrast is presented to us by these different ideas of a
universal empire! The distinctions of race are indelible; a Jew cannot
become a Greek, or a Greek a Jew; birth is an event of past time;
according to the Judaizers, their nation, as a nation, was ever to be
dominant; and all other nations, as such, were inferior and subject.
What was the necessary consequence? There is nothing men more pride
themselves on than birth, for this very reason, that it is irrevocable;
it can neither be given to those who have it not, nor taken away from
those who have. The Almighty can do anything which admits of doing; He
can compensate every evil; but a Greek poet says that there is one thing
impossible to Him--to undo what is done. Without throwing the thought
into a shape which borders on the profane, we may see in it the reason
why the idea of national power was so dear and so dangerous to the Jew.
It was his consciousness of inalienable superiority t