be
construed as springing from an awakened zeal for the instigator's own
Church; a suspicion they could not permit to rest upon them. No, it is
not the Jew's religion that makes him obnoxious and a danger to the
state, but it is his descent from the eldest son of Noah. True, the
Jews have at no time adopted it as a national name. "Semitic" is of
comparatively recent date, an abstract word intended merely for
scientific classification, never meant for discrimination of any
portion of the Semitic races, or to become a hissing and a byword or a
mask for robbers of human rights and destroyers of human happiness.

The victims of this crusade are not a nameless horde for whom a
designation had to be coined; they are known to history for three
thousand years as Hebrews, Israelites, Jews, and they have no mind to
exchange these names for any other. But a new "Hep Hep" was wanted,
and so "Semites" was hauled from the world of books, disfigured, and
fastened upon the Jewish gabardine in noble emulation of the barbarism
of the Middle Ages. The more senseless, the more welcome it was as a
bugbear to frighten the populace and to stir into flames the sparks of
fanaticism which are always smouldering in the hearts of the vulgar,
whether of low degree or high degree, worldly or ghostly.

The strangest thing, however, in this learned falsification is that
it should have succeeded so well with people calling themselves
Christians and clinging to that name often after they have given up
all its historic substance. Is Christianity not purely Semitic at the
core? Is it not based upon the Semitic conception of the relation
between man and his Creator? The great efforts to liberalize and
rationalize the Church which the last century witnessed, up to
Professor Harnack's recent attempt to sum up "Das Wesen des
Christenthums,"--what are all these but endeavors to free it from
foreign accretions and envelopments and to bring its Semitic character
into greater prominence?

It is the only Asiatic conception of religion that has subdued Europe
and America, and that still holds undisputed sway over all its diverse
nationalities. The very name which symbolizes to them all that is
noblest, purest, and most blessed, points to that source as
unfailingly as the needle of the compass to the poles. Harnack claims
that Christianity is not one religion amongst others, but _The
Religion_, the only one fulfilling all the conditions of its highest
ideal. The