Israel, at this stage when The Eternal was revealed to him, inferred nothing, reasoned out nothing; he felt and experienced. When he begins to speculate, in the schools of Rabbinism, he quickly shows how much less native talent than the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester he has for this perilous business. Happily, when The Eternal was revealed to him, he had not yet begun to speculate.
Israel personified, indeed, his Eternal, for he was strongly moved, he was an orator and poet. Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is, says Goethe; and so man tends always to represent everything under his own figure. In poetry and eloquence man may and must follow this tendency, but in science it often leads him astray. Israel, however, did not scientifically predicate personality of God; he would not even have had a notion what was meant by it. He called him the maker of all things, who gives drink to all out of his pleasures as out of a river; but he was led to this by no theory of a first cause. The grandeur of the spectacle given by the world, the grandeur of the sense of its all being not ourselves, being above and beyond ourselves and immeasurably dwarfing us, a man of imagination instinctively personifies as a single, mighty, living and productive power; as Goethe tells us that the words which rose naturally to his lips, when he stood on the top of the Brocken, were: 'Lord, what is man, that thou mindest him, or the son of man, that thou makest account of him?'[1] But Israel's confessing and extolling of this power came not even from his imaginative feeling, but came first from his gratitude for righteousness. To one who knows what conduct is, it is a joy to be alive; and the not ourselves, which by bringing forth for us righteousness makes our happiness, working just in the same sense, brings forth this glorious world to be righteous in. That is the notion at the bottom of a Hebrew s praise of a Creator; and if we
