or moral. He admits that Judaism is materialistic in this sense, that it concerns itself exclusively with the present life, and he maintains that, just because it does so limit the scope of its calculations and efforts, do things, so far as this world is concerned, go well with it. "The substantial difference," he observes, "between Judaism and Christianity is, that the one desires to teach us how to live, the other how to die. Judaism discourses of the excellence of temporal pleasure, the divinity—if I may be permitted to use the expression—of length of days; Christianity, on the other hand, emphasizes the excellence of sorrow and the divinity of death. It is no wonder, then," he continues, "if, when competition arises between a race trained and hardened for worldly conflict and communities who have been taught to regard it as a duty to lay up their chief treasure in another world and to despise this, success should fall to the former rather than to the latter."
There is probably a measure of truth in these views. The Jews have, on the whole, been objected to because they have been too thrifty. The complaint has not been that they could not keep up with the pace of the rest of the world, but rather that they had a pace of their own, with which the rest of the world found it difficult to keep up. It is true also that a great bane, perhaps the chief bane, of the Christian world, has been a want of adaptation of means to ends, and a certain indisposition to take the laws of life—particularly its physical laws—seriously. Whence, if not from this cause, the huge pauper population with which Christendom has ever been burdened? Whence the failures of every kind with which the whole extent of society is strewn? There are people by the thousand who do not know a fact when they see it. There are thousands who dash themselves against the irresistible, or seek to flee the inevitable, instead of recognizing that what must be must be, and that the part of wisdom is to bow to inexorable law and seek to make with it the best terms possible. The world abounds with incapacity arising apparently from a kind of fateful wrongheadedness. We have thinkers who can not act, and actors who can not think, and people overflowing with sentiment who do more mischief with their good intentions than others with their bad. We have nothing to do with any of the theological implications of Mr. Wolf's article—which we need hardly say was not written with any theological purpose—but we incline to think that the main lesson which it contains is one which even those who would repudiate those implications most strongly might well consent to learn. That lesson we take to be this: that so much of "materialism" as consists in taking a clear view and firm grasp of facts, and in looking to facts rather than to fancies or sentiments for guidance, constitutes an important element of success in life, and should be so recognized in every scheme of education. To organize education, indeed, on any other basis, is but to invite failure, defeat, and misery. Whatever superiority may be assigned to the spiritual nature of man as contrasted with his physical part, the dependence of the former on the latter can hardly be questioned. When the bodily estate sinks into wretchedness, the moral character too often finds the same level. On every ground, therefore, we want a system of teaching that will help a man to help himself, thus providing at once for his physical comfort, his self-respect, and his intellectual and moral development. Mr. Spencer has said all this, as well as it can be said, in his treatise on education; and Mr. Lucien Wolf, following a very different path, and with very different objects in view, brings us again face to face with truths which we can not take too seriously to heart.
