soul of Israel was stirring with might and dwelling with radiant beauty in the breast of the son of Joseph and Mary, and expressed itself with majestic eloquence and heart-conquering grace and simplicity in his sermons, his parables, and, above all, in his pure and holy life. We Israelites claim Jesus of Nazareth as our own, as one of our best and greatest masters, as one of our immortal fathers, as one of our saintliest heroes of righteousness and love. Whatever crimes have been committed against us by cruel and misguided men in his name, verily we do not charge him with them. Those blind and heartless fanatics did not learn cruelty from him, the teacher of love. Surely the example of the meek and lowly rabbi of Galilee, who taught with the prophets and teachers of Israel to suffer persecution and not to persecute, did not inspire the zealots with the fury and madness of persecution. We claim the ethical teachings of Jesus, as preserved in the Gospels, as our own spiritual possession.

Still, my holding Jesus in profoundest veneration, my enthusiasm for his sublime teachings, does not make me a Christian. Just as little are those Gentiles true Christians who, like me, deny his divinity and all the beliefs which cohere with that cardinal dogma. I make bold to express my humble opinion that the true Unitarian church is a section or sect of the universal church of Yahvism, within which Jesus lived, moved, and had his being, and of whose truths and ideals he was a glorious exponent. But why do I not join the Unitarians, with whom I agree in most essentials of faith and practice? My answer is: A large wing of the Unitariaus still coquette with the peculiar dogmas of Christianity. There is a wonderful magic in historical words and names. They tend to draw men back to their former contents. The world still needs the ancient historical church of uncompromising prophetic monotheism. For God's sake, for mankind's sake, we can not renounce the mission of standing guard around the ark of

monotheism intrusted to us by the seers and martyrs of Israel. For this reason I am a Jew, and not a Unitarian. One more reason I shall give for being a Jew, and I shall have done: The Gentiles who have totally discarded Christianity and, to all intents and purposes, are at one with us in faith, shrink from identifying themselves with poor, despised, scattered, and maligned Israel. They are afraid of losing caste by being named together with the Jews as associates in the same church. But I am a Jew for that very reason that the Jews are in all Christian lands under the ban of social prejudice, and are in many kingdoms disfranchised and oppressed under the very shadow of the cross. I follow the example of the two great Jewish martyrs, Jeremiah and Jesus. They made their home among the poor and despised. They ate the bread of affliction with those who were sore of heart and poor in spirit. Their great souls' love belonged to the down-trodden and outcast children of God. Their companions and friends were in the hovels of poverty, not among the mighty in palaces and courts. I, too, inspired by their example and teachings, wish to be a Jew in these latter days. I cast my lot with the despised. I am a brother to the most wretched and hopeless of men, to the Russian Jew, whose face and form tell the woeful tale of Christian persecution and contempt killing body and soul. You, proud Christians, are amazed at the sight of him, so disfigured and scarcely human in his visage. But I bid him welcome in his rags to my heart and home. I touch his sores with a brother's tender hand. His bruises are my bruises; I bleed with his wounds; I quiver with the stripes, physical and moral, which poor Israel receives at the hands of Christian rulers and nations. You have a smile and a contemptuous name for the people of endless sorrows. But their sorrows sit brooding over my soul by day and night. The misery of the Jews, of whatever land, poisons my joys and makes life a martyrdom to me. The shame and dishonor with

which malicious tongues try to brand them burn themselves into my soul. The demon fury which rages against the Jews in anti-Semitic Germany, Austria, and Roumania haunts my waking hours and torments me in my very dreams. The blasphemous philosophy of Christian thinkers which declare the Jew to be doomed by the curse of heredity to moral inferiority, makes me blush for mankind. The contemptuous tolerance of good Christians, the exaggerated praises they bestow upon the Jew with a patronizing air, fill me with pain and loathing. I will not take refuge in a church to save myself and my children from the common lot of the Jews. I sit on the ground with my brethren to take their hands in mine. I strive to raise them with what power there is in me to new spiritual heights, whence they shall see the landscape of the future blooming with blessings universal, which they and their fathers have sown with tears. I pray God to open their eyes that they may see the church universal of Yahve standing as a new Jerusalem with seven gates flung wide open, through which the Gentiles may stream in to kneel with us at the altar of the righteous and merciful God of Humanity, and blend their voices with ours in the cry: "Hear, O mankind, the Lord, our God, the Lord is One."

WHY I STUDIED MEDICINE.

THE fact that I have for the last five or six years given whatever time I could spare from the arduous and absorbing duties of the ministry to the study of medicine; the fact, moreover, that the University of Louisville has lately honored me with the diploma of a physician, gives the public the right to inquire, and makes it incumbent upon me to explain, why I have so long devoted time, labor, and thought to a field of knowledge that seems to lie out of all relation to that of religion, which it is my calling assiduously to cultivate. It may surprise you to be told that it was from religious motives, from an intense craving of my soul to obtain a direct answer to certain perplexing questions, that I pursued a course of study that must have appeared to you absolutely useless to a preacher of righteousness, to a teacher of faith in a living God of wisdom and mercy.

Religion and science, the priests of atheism assure us with an air of infallibility, are antagonistic powers. The more diligently you investigate nature according to the strict methods of scientific inquiry, they say, the more readily will faith lose its hold on your mind. They cry: "As long as nature is to you a book sealed with seven seals you will be able to hold fast to the traditional belief in a universal supreme intelligence, incarnate in all existence as the creative and purposeful cause of causes. But as soon as you have learned to open the volume of nature and to read the eternal facts writ therein by the hand of necessity, your faith in the kinship of nature with mind will vanish as an illusion and a dream." Listening to such assertions,

I said to myself: "Let me examine for myself, whether a deeper and wider knowledge of nature does indeed teach the rank atheism which is alleged to be the last outcome of science. Let me learn to know as thoroughly and minutely as possible what modern science has ascertained regarding the physical framework of man, which is doubtless the highest manifestation of the universal energy, the last and most perfect fruit that has grown in the worldgarden on the topmost branch of the tree of life. Should the study of the anatomical structure and the physiological life of the human body force upon me the conviction, that the world of nature is absolutely different from the world of mind, that there is in the former no trace of the presence and activity of intelligence, I will with an aching heart, yet in obedience to my honest conviction, give up the calling of a minister, which presupposes the belief in an absolute and infinite wisdom of which both nature and the human soul are perennial revelations."

Today, after years of converse with the highest forms of nature, I make the solemn declaration that such converse has made me more genuinely religious than ever, that I have come forth from communion with nature firmly convinced that a supreme intelligence, passing man's understanding, is manifest in the masterpiece of creation, in the human body! Oh, happy hours that I spent in thy temple, O Science, hours of blessedness and prayerfulness, when my spirit felt itself near the creative spirit of the universe, when my soul sang joyfully, "I am wonderfully and fearfully made, O Lord. Verily, the body of man is the sanctuary which Thy infinite wisdom has formed. When I consider Thy wondrous work, this mortal frame of mind, which Thy will has fashioned, my spirit is overwhelmed within me, and my whole being bends in adoration to Thee." Life's mystery of mysteries has embodied itself in us, and is become flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone. The infinite Self has woven on the loom of time the living