solitary zvalks by night; and habitually silent about his meditations. The government does not like young men of talent the subject of whose meditations is unknown to it."
The instinct of the Austrian government had discovered that when Genius goes forth alone to listen to the Voices of Nature, events are likely to occur soon afterwards calculated to disturb the peace of stagnation. And, as usual, tyranny forgot to inquire whether imprisoning Genius is likely to cure it of a taste for liberty!
Just so, tyranny has, on many occasions, forgotten to inquire whether trying to cramp the Theistic Seer-hood of Judaism is likely to cure it of the habit of seeing God.
The function of Reform has hitherto been carried on for the Gentile world, episodically and violently, by a succession of such men as Savonarola, Bruno, Luther, Cromwell, Wesley, Mazzini, Maurice, Renan and Hinton. The intention of the founders of Mosaism was to organize a body which should (after some centuries of preliminary discipline) acquire the power of accustoming the whole world to having that function performed for it as regularly, quietly and constantly as the lungs reform the blood.
Judaism, as a sect, far from becoming more intelligible and more tolerated because of the progress of liberality and culture, must, on the contrary, become more impossible and more intolerable with every advance in civilization. It has no place in the modern world, unless it is the intellectual heart-and-lungs of Humanity, viz., an organ whose function is to receive all the thought-material gathered by the Gentile world; purify and aerate it by submitting it to the action of that circulating rhythm which is characteristic of Nature's vital
