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Our Relation to the Sacred Tribe
169

with its Art and its fancy, its sensibility and its weakness, is the "Bride of Christ,"—the counterpart and destined helpmeet of the pure strong Hebrew faith. We Christians have got our life into confusion by trying to copy our Ideal "Christ"; we are not enough like him to know how to set about it. Jews do not go into ecstacies about "Jesus," because they are (potentially at least) himself.[1] When Judaism and Christianity have discovered their true relation to each other; when we Christians, especially, have realized that our true function is not so much copying Christ ourselves as organizing social life so as to facilitate the development of Judaism into its natural likeness to him, surely that will be the Millennium prophesied of old, "the Bridal of the Earth and Sky."

This may seem a romantic way of dealing with those epidemics of Jew-hating, which, as a prosaic matter of fact, often originate in trade jealousies and in envy of the special business faculty of Jews. The true Prophet, however, is not he who conjures himself into mystic trances, in order that by shutting his eyes to earth he may see into Heaven; but he who looks at the facts that God shows on earth by the Light which God sends from Heaven. Such an one can algebraize the slightest indications of progressive tendency in man. He thrills with the joy of future harvests when he sees one plant become more fruitful under human care; and hears all Handel's music in the tones of Jubal's lyre. And if it

  1. I speak here only of Jewish reformers in religion. Of the Jews who devote themselves to Finance, Commerce and Politics I have nothing to say, except that they are what Europe has made of them. What Europe has made of them should be carefully studied by those who are undertaking the task of bringing Chinese and Hindus into contact with Western civilization.