So far from Germanism being synonymous with Judaism, its analogies are to be sought within the five maritime countries which preceded Germany, albeit less efficiently, in the path of militarism. It is the same alliance as prevailed everywhere between the traders and the armies and navies, and the Kaiser's crime consists mainly in turning back the movement of the world which through the Hague Conferences was approaching brotherhood, or at least a mitigation of the horrors of war. His blasphemies are no less archaic. He repeats Oliver Cromwell, but with less simplicity, while his artistic aspiration complicates the Puritan with the Cavalier. "From childhood," he is quoted as saying, "I have been under the influence of five men-Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Theodoric II, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon." No great man moulds himself thus like others. It is but a theatrical greatness. But anyhow none of these names are Jewish, and not thus were "the Kings of Jerusalem" even "six thousand years ago." Our kings had the dull duty of copying out and studying the Torah, and the Rabbis reminded monarchy that the Torah demands forty-eight qualifications, whereas royalty only thirty, and that the crown of a good name is the best of all. Compare the German National Anthem "Heil dir im Siegeskranz" with the noble prayer for the Jewish King in the seventy-second psalm, if you wish to understand the difference between Judaism and Germanism. This King, too, is to conquer his enemies, but he is also to redeem the needy from oppression and violence, "and precious will their blood be in his sight."
VII
If I were asked to sum up in a word the essential difference between Judaism and Germanism, it would be the word "Recessional." While the prophets and historians of Germany monotonously glorify their nation, the Jewish writers as monotonously rebuke theirs. "You only have I known among all the families of the earth," says the message through Amos. "Therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities." The Bible, as I have said before, is an anti-Semitic book. "Israel is the villain, not the hero, of his own story." Alone among epics, it is out for truth, not high heroics. To flout the Pharisees was not reserved for Jesus. "Behold, ye fast for strife and contention," said Isaiah, "and to smite with the fist of wickedness." While some German writers, not content with the great men Germany has so abundantly produced, vaunt that all others, from Jesus to Dante, from Montaigne to Michael Angelo, are of Teuton blood, Jewish literature unflinchingly exposes the flaws even of a Moses and a David. It is this passion for veracity unknown among other peoples-is even Washington's story told without gloss?-that gives false colour to the legend of Israel's ancient savagery. "The title of a nation to its territory," says Seeley, "is generally to be sought in primitive times and would be found, if we could recover it, to rest upon violence and massacre." The dispossession of the Red Indian by America, of the Maori by New Zealand, is almost within living memory. But in national legends this universal process is sophisticated.
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento,
the Æneid told the all-invading Roman, putting of course the contemporary ideal backwards-as all missons are put-and into the prophetic mouth of Jove:-
Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis et debelare superbos.
It was for similarly exalted purposes that Israel was to occupy Palestine, yet with what unique denigration the Bible turns upon him: "Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart dost thou go to possess this land; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee."
In English literature this note of "Recessional" was sounded long before Kipling. Milton, though he claimed that "God's manner" was to reveal himself "first to His Englishmen," added that they "mark not the methods of His counsel and are unworthy."
"Is India free," wrote Cowper, "or do we grind her still?" "Secure from actual warfare," sang Coleridge, "we have loved to swell the war-whoop." For Wordsworth England was simply the least evil of the nations. And Mr. Chesterton has just written a "History of England" in the very spirit of a Micah flagellating the classes "who loved fields and seized them." But if in Germany a voice of criticism breaks the chorus of self-adoration, it is usually from a Jew like Maximilian Harden, for Jews, as Ambassador Gerard testifies, represent almost the only real culture in Germany. I have been at pains to examine the literature of the German Synagogue, which if Germanism were Judiasm, ought to show a double dose of original sin. But so far from finding any swagger of a Chosen People, whether Jewish or German, I find in its most popular work-Lazarus's "Soziale Ethik im Judentum"-published as late as November, 1913, by the League of German Jews-a grave indictment of militarism. For the venerable philosopher, while justly explaining the glamour of the army by its subordination of the individual to the communal weal, yet pointed out emphatically that what unites individuals separates nations. "The work of justice shall be peace," he quotes from Isaiah. I am far from supposing that the old Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing is not still latent-indeed, we know that one Professor suggested at a recent Nietzsche anniversary that the Germans should try to rise not to Supermen but to Men, and that another now lies in prison for explaining in his "Biologie des Krieges" that the real objection to war is simply that it compels men to act unlike men. So that, when moreover we remember that the noblest and most practical treatise on "Perpetual Peace" came from that other German professor, Kant, the hope is not altogether ausgechlossen that in the internal convulsion that must follow the war, there may be an upheaval of that finer Germanism of which we should be only too proud to say that it is Judaism.
VIII
But meantime we are waiting, and the soul "waiteth for the Lord more than watchmen look for the morning, yea, more than watchmen for the morning." Again, as in earlier periods of history, the world lies in darkness, listening to the silence of God-a silence that can be felt.
"Watchmen, what of the night?" Such a blackness fell upon the ancient Jews when Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But, turning from empty apocalyptic visions, they drew in on themselves and created an inner Jerusalem, which has solaced and safeguarded them ever since. Such a blackness fell on the ancient Christians when the Huns invaded Rome, and the young Christian world, robbed of its millennial hopes, began to wonder if perchance this was not the vengeance of the discarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St. Augustine to create an inner "City of God." How shall humanity meet this blackest crisis of all? What new "City of God" can it build on the tragic wreckage of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel no contribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus. And it was always an exaggerated quarrel-half misunderstanding, like most quarrels. Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was other than One. Jesus but applied to himself distributively-as logicians say-those conceptions of divine sonship and suffering service which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theology of atonement woven by Paul under Greek influences, either of them might have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism which its essential genius demands, and which even without them it only just missed. Is it not humiliating that Islam, whose Koran expressly recalls its obligation to our prophets, should have beaten them in the work of universalization? Maimonides acknowledged the good work done by Jesus and Mohammed in propagating the Bible. But if the universalism they achieved held faulty elements, is that any reason why the purer truth should shrink from universalization? Has Judaism less future than Buddhism-that religion of negation and monkery-whose sacred classics enjoin the Bhiksu to camp in and contemplate a cemetery? Has it less inspiration and optimism than that apocalyptic vision of the ultimate victory of Good which consoles the disciples of Zoroaster? If there is anything now discredited in its ancient Scriptures, the Synagogue can, as of yore, relegate it to the Apocrypha, even as it can enrich the canon with later expressions of the Hebrew genius. Its one possible rival, Islam, is, as Kuenen maintains, as sterile for the future as Buddhism, too irretrievably narrowed to the Arab mentality. But why, despite his magnificent tribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the last word is with Christianity? Eucken, too, would call the future Christian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonement as injurious to religion, and the doctrine of the Trinity as a stumbling-block rather than a help. Abraham Lincoln being only a plain man, was not able to juggle with himself like a German theologian, and with the simplicity of greatness he confessed: "I have never united myself to any Church, because I have found difficulty in giving my assent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated statements of the Christian doctrine which characterize their Articles of Belief and Confessions of Faith." "When any church," he added, "will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for membership, ... 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might, and thy neighbour as thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and with all my soul."