The Old Faith in the New Land.

of the past upon the territory of the present and the future. New circumstances have bereft them of the spirit of life; they linger on in our midst in the anemic manner of the shadows moving through Sheol. All attempts to revive them must fail; why babble about a return to rites and ceremonies which willy-nilly we have outgrown, why seek to raise up artificially things that are dead, to wheedle ourselves into obsolete beliefs which can no longer stir our breasts or better our souls? Dr. Moses was opposed as a man holding his views of Judaism could not help being to the schemes of the political Zionists, as well as to the nebulous movement of the New Orthodoxy with all its oracular watchwords relating to the past, historic continuity, the claims of the ancient literature, and suchlike. He knew that watchwords and romantic phrases and the kickshaws of theorists were not synonymous with life, that they would never respond to the vital needs and the spiritual yearnings of men living in the heart of American civilization. None revered the past and its sanctities more than he, but he believed that "religion," in the words of Robertson Smith, "can not live on the mere memory of the past." He looked upon himself not as a slave ironed with the chains of dead centuries, but as a chosen servant of the present and the future. His was not a voice coming out of the sepulchres. "A new time has begun," he cries, "and new work must be done by us!" The spirit of the bold pioneers lived in him. He fought with those who, like King Arthur's knights, were "the fair beginners of a nobler time." Fervently he espoused every cause that augured well for the ideal work of Israel and humanity. Though in his mode of thought he was much more radical than our sainted teacher, Rabbi Isaac M. Wise-the Ezra, and the Nehemiah also, of American Judaism-he was an ardent supporter of the latter in all the momentous movements he

Isaac M. Wise.

inaugurated, and his friend through thick and thin. The Hebrew Union College from the day of its foundation had a staunch champion in Adolph Moses, who foretold at once that it would become the fount, if possibly not of the highest academic learning, certainly of vital teaching and spiritual upliftment to the Jews of this country, as, indeed, time has proved it to be. In fine, recognizing that a Divine Service on Sunday mornings might be turned into a profitable agency for the spread of his religion, he caused it to be instituted in his congregation. In the autumn of the year 1892, he began to hold such a service at his Temple, and thenceforward he had an enlarged opportunity for the delivery of his lofty message. Indeed, he became the apostle of liberalism to Louisville. Mixed congregations of Jews and Gentiles-brethren in ideals-came to hear the word of Yahve from his lips, the broad, universal, exalted faith he preached. Who knows but those assemblies fulfilled partly and partly foreshadowed the days when, as in Zechariah's vision, "ten men shall take hold, out of all the languages of the nations, shall even take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you"!

Apostle of
Liberalism.

Of course, none could expect a following of thousands for a man at the core of whose teaching lay what we have described as Yahvism. Embodying, on the one hand, a very lofty religious idealism that drew vitality from the remote founts of metaphysic thought, and urging, on the other hand, what could not but seem to the masses a bold breach with the past, the peculiar doctrine of Adolph Moses had to content itself with the precious appreciation of the few. For is there aught, in such matters, that men in general are less willing to yield up than old names? The rather, it

A Leader of the Few.

would seem, we would surrender the substance than the time-honored title, the picture than the frame. Though various men be at one in their views of life and

faith, yet will each cling stoutly to the name his fathers have called holy. It is a species of family-tree. In this instance, morever, the new name, Yahvism, was advocated simply as the revival of an old term for an ancient truth, as a tie that possibly would unite men of similar thoughts and ideals who now are separated by the ill-luck of mutually exclusive labels, as a title that might serve to reconcile the highest forms of Judaism and Christianity. On the other hand, the discourse, "Why I Am a Jew," is clear proof of the fact that Dr. Moses was not minded to turn his back upon Jews and Judaism, even in name, as long as a single human being, be he never so humble and distant, were caused to suffer by reason of loyalty to the faith of Israel. It is here that we see in juxtaposition the diverse dominant elements of his character: the frankness of the unbiased scholar and the fervor of the universal idealist combined with an unexpugnable fidelity to the cause of his co-religionists. His soul ribboned by the mystery of the centuries, by most tender sympathy, to the Jews, could never-as who could?-grow unconscious of the fact that it was the man known as Jew, not as Yahvist, who, despite his baggage of oriental ceremonies and medieval superstitions and occidental corruptions, had through all the darkness of the ages kept alight the lamp of monotheism and morality. Pending the world's acceptance of the ideal name he advocated-" for the sake of the way of peace," as our sages would have said it was a small minority only upon whom he might rely for full sympathy and help.

Neither did Dr. Moses possess the qualities which ordinarily fit a man for the leading of large hosts, those qualities of intrepidity in the face of the world, and selffaith, and tact which distinguished, for example, the divinely gifted Isaac M. Wise. Powerful and fearless in the realm of ideas, in the conquest of the kingdom of thought, he had much lesser skill in the practical world. Not only

James Lane
Allen.

was he naturally possessed of an almost childlike naïveté, but also he depended to the very last, in a rare manner, upon the buoying and the support, one might almost say, the commendation, of his fellows. Without Aaron and Hur staying up his hands, he would grow faint and unsteady in his fight with Amalek. Sensitive to an unusual degree-a trait disclosed nowhere so touchingly as in his ironical discourse on "What a Minister and Layman can do in Half-an-Hour"-he could never disenthral himself from the bondage of Public Opinion, hard though he struggled against it. Ofttimes this was to him a source of grief and doubt and tears. "To you,' " he wrote but a year before his death to Mr. James Lane Allen, in reply to the latter's praise of "The Religion of Moses," "I make bold to confess that I have hitherto had a very poor opinion of my ability and what I have done towards building up my own character and the better life of my fellow-men. We poor preachers are so easily misled to gauge our success by the number of people who come to hear our sermons. This is a false standard which vitiates our whole life and distorts our vision as to what is truly valuable in a man's activity. Depending for success upon 'Public Opinion,' we come to believe that the final judgment rests with the masses." In the course of the same letter he thanks Mr. Allen for having raised him, by his commendation, to a "higher level of self-consciousness." "This is the highest privilege of superior men," he continues, in a strain that recurs in his writings. "After they have come to occupy a very high station, they are able to lift up, through their esteem and love, many a struggling pilgrim." This quality of self-depreciation, outdoing humility, this spiritual nervousness it was that rendered Adolph Moses deeply appreciative of the least token of sympathy and encouragement shown him by his fellow-men, that made his letters to his friends veritable love-letters. But it will be seen easily how it was bound to hamper the practical work and

the worldly success of a man whose philosophy was radical to the core, requiring aggresive leadership to win for it the adhesion of numbers.

Resumé.

Thus we have traced the life and the labors of Adolph Moses from their humble, wellnigh hidden source in remote Poland, the old homestead of Jewish scholarship, to the place where they emptied into the infinite ocean of humanity and civilization. We have seen him pass through many a struggle in the service of the ideals of truth and holiness. Some things, of course, we have refrained from touching, especially the emotions and the experiences which men are wont to hide from the eye of their fellows, but which Dr. Moses had an ingenuous way of unbosoming. His soul, in the main, was a stage upon which was enacted a drama not at all infrequent in the history of Israel: the drama of two civilizations seeking each other's hand, the so-called civilizations of Hellas and Judea, Western Culture and Judaism, with all the agony and bitterness and conflicts and joys that ever have attended such intermarriage. It was the drama that was known, though under a different form, in biblical times, that Philo lived through in ancient Alexandria, and Maimuni, also, who admonished his disciple that "he ought to know all that is fit to be known," and Jacob Anatolio who, in the twelfth century, with Michael Scot served the cause of culture at the court of Naples, and Spinoza who harmonized the Bible and Maimuni and the Qabbalah with Descartes and founded modern pantheism, and Moses Mendelssohn in whose intellectual garden the plants of the East and the West grew up in such charmful promiscuity, to say nothing of thousands of others that have gone through the same experience "in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the steep place", "unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung." And like Moses Maimuni and Moses Mendelssohn, his more illustrious predecessors, who would not allow their metaphysics to thwart