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178
Logic Taught by Love

living and of being orderly, the more clearly he sees that the main object of the founders of Mosaism was to prepare a race capable of perennially keeping up those quiet alternations of mental attitude which are the natural purifiers of all scientific and artistic ideas, and the thought-equivalent of the rhythmic movements of the physical heart.

The Pentateuch is the formal ark, which contains, as a Shekinah, the essential ideas of Mosaism. But one can never learn any science or art by any amount of study of even the best text-book, without at least attempting to work some examples; least of all can that most glorious of all arts, the art of organizing thought, be so learned. A child's first breath is an effort, and perhaps a painful one; but after one full inhalation, the process goes on easily enough! A rhythm is always delightful to those who have once got into the swing of it. A Jew only needs to get one true conception of what living truth means; he may then attend to any honest vocation to which he is adapted; he simply cannot help purifying the thought-life of every one around him; the hereditary faculty for doing it is so ingrained that it goes on without his consciousness. Orthodox people never seem to see that their singular dislike to Reformers is of the very same nature as the dislike of the Egyptians to Moses; of the professional scribes to the young teacher who wanted to throw on old prophecy the light of a living experience gained by the attempt to realize the prophetic ideal. It is the dislike of the Inquisition to Galileo; of the medical profession in Harvey's time to the doctrine of the circulation of the blood; the dislike of the stagnant