Chosen Peoples | Page 2

a cathedral has upon the emotions. Further, it reserves to the priesthood a kind of esoteric knowledge, which gives them an additional authority that they would desire to maintain. So we find that in the days of Marcus Aurelius an ancient Salian liturgy was used in the Roman temples which had become almost unintelligible to the worshippers. The ritual of the religion of Isis in Greece was, at the same period, conducted in an unknown tongue. In the present age Church Slavonic, the ecclesiastical language of the orthodox Slavs, is only just intelligible to the peasantry of Russia and the neighbouring Slav countries. The Buddhists of China conduct their services in Sanscrit, which neither the monks nor the people understand, and the services of the Buddhists in Japan are either in Sanscrit or in ancient Chinese. I believe it is a fact that in Abyssinia, again, the liturgy is in a language called Geez, which is no longer in use as a living tongue and is not understood.
But we need not go to earlier centuries or to distant countries for examples. In any Roman Catholic church in London to-day you will find the service conducted in a language which, if understood at all by the general body of the congregation, has been learnt by them only for the purposes of the liturgy.
Of all these ritual languages which have outlived their current use and have been preserved for religious purposes alone, Hebrew is, so far as I am aware, the only one which has ever showed signs of renewing its old vitality--like the roses of Jericho which appear to be dead and shrivelled but which, when placed in water, recover their vitality and their bloom. We may join in hoping that again in Palestine Hebrew may recover something of its old supremacy in the field of morals and of intellect.
To render this possible the work of scholars such as Arthur Davis has contributed. To him this was a labour of love, and for love. He would receive no payment for any of his religious work or writings. Part of the profits that accrued from the publication of his edition of "The Services of the Synagogue" has been devoted to the formation of a fund from which will be defrayed the expenses--after the first--of a series of annual lectures on subjects of Jewish interest, to be delivered by men of various schools of thought. We are fortunate that the initial lecture is to be delivered to-day by the most distinguished of living Jewish men of letters.
Arthur Davis was a man of much elevation and charm of character. He took an active part in the work of communal, and particularly educational, organizations. He was one of those men--not rare among Jews, though the rest of the world does not always recognize it--who are philanthropic in spirit, practical in action, modest, self-sacrificing, devoted to a fine family life, having in them much of the student and something even of the saint. It is fitting that his memory should be kept alive.
HERBERT SAMUEL.

CHOSEN PEOPLES
I
The claim that the Jews are a "Chosen People" has always irritated the Gentiles. "From olden times," wrote Philostratus in the third century, "the Jews have been opposed not only to Rome but to the rest of humanity." Even Julian the Apostate, who designed to rebuild their Temple, raged at the doctrine of their election. Sinai, said the Rabbis with a characteristic pun, has evoked Sinah (hatred).
In our own day, the distinguished ethical teacher, Dr. Stanton Coit, complains, like Houston Chamberlain, that our Bible has checked and blighted all other national inspiration: in his book "The Soul of America," he even calls upon me to repudiate unequivocally "the claim to spiritual supremacy over all the peoples of the world."
The recent revelation of racial arrogance in Germany has provided our enemies with a new weapon. "Germanism is Judaism," says a writer in the American Bookman. The proposition contains just that dash of truth which is more dangerous than falsehood undiluted; and the saying ascribed to Von Tirpitz in 1915 that the Kaiser spent all his time praying and studying Hebrew may serve to give it colour. "As he talks to-day at Potsdam and Berlin," says Verhaeren, in his book "Belgium's Agony," "the Kings of Israel and their prophets talked six thousand years ago at Jerusalem." The chronology is characteristic of anti-Semitic looseness: six thousand years ago the world by Hebrew reckoning had not been created, and at any rate the then Kings of Jerusalem were not Jewish. But it is undeniable that Germanism, like Judaism, has evolved a doctrine of special election. Spiritual in the teaching of Fichte and Treitschke, the doctrine became gross and narrow in the Deutsche Religion of Friedrich Lange. "The German people is the elect of God and its