mony with the relative civilisation of human communities, and are we not thus deprived of all historic evidence of the true nature of Divinity? Yet modern theologians introduce the same fallacy into Christian creeds, and exhaust the resources of apologetic piety in the vain effort to identify the barbarous Jehovah of the ancient Hebrews with the heavenly Father of Jesus of Nazareth.

When the Jews of the Restoration undertook the compilation of a national literature, the recent adoption of monotheism sanctioned recourse to the traditions and records of other nations, in search of Elohim's dealings with primeval Man, before His revelation as the Hebrew Jehovah. The editors of Genesis, therefore, borrowed, from Chaldean and other foreign sources, the legends of Creation, Paradise, the Fall of Man, semi-human giants, a universal Flood, and the postdiluvian confusion of tongues-all of which they amalgamated with the traditions of their race in the imaginative pages of constructive history; and thus compromised revelation by a fabulous cosmogony and mythical annals, which assume the form of fiction in the light of modern research.

From the legend of a decalogue, lithographed by the finger of God, we learn that Moses introduced the moral precepts of the Egyptians to his countrymen as a divine revelation: but, even centuries after possession of the Ten Commandments, Semitic ethics fall immeasurably short of the moral culture of Egyptian citizens and Achaian Greeks, as disclosed on comparison of monumental evidence and Homeric song with the licentious and sanguinary annals of the children of Israel.

When the Hebrew oracle of Urim and Thummim became, from some unknown cause, a lost secret to the Levitical Priesthood, self-appointed prophets adopted the vain illusion of revelation evoked by artistic minstrelsy, and thus Imposture, Fanaticism, or Insanity might utter oracles as the voice of God, until this superstition also perished with the lapse of time, and Hebrew Prophets became as voiceless as Urim and Thummim.

The prophetic gaze of Hebrew Nâbis did not vainly scan the invisible horizon of remote futurity, but watched the shadows of impending events susceptible of human forecast; and the fanciful adaptation of their vague predictions to the historical events of later centuries is the pious work of imaginative theologians, sustaining dogmas by predictive miracles, and even carrying Hebrew prophets into the nineteenth century, to condemn a world to premature dissolution which science tells us will still roll onwards, freighted with the organised evolutions of remote futurity, thousands of centuries after the prophetic craze shall have been classed by coming savans among the theological fossils of dead religions.

The theocratic policy which fostered international hostility, and deprived the Hebrews of all friendly allies, had foredoomed them to that destruction which inevitably falls on nations controlled by the absorbing egotism which ignores the natural rights of alien races. The secular struggle of the heroic Maccabees came too late in Hebrew history to establish a kingdom or found an empire; and, when all hope of victory through natural means had perished, the old inheritance of Fanaticism revived in Messianic dreams of national restoration.

In Babylonian exile the Jews had heard of Persian expectation of a coming Saviour and Regenerator of Mankind; and, with characteristic egotism, had assumed that the Messiah of Aryan dreams was the Hebrew Prince predestined by Semitic prophets to restore the throne of David and renew the glories of Solomon. As all reasonable expectation of national independence vanished, the fatal fascination of a phantom empire transformed Messianic enthusiasm into the fierce fanaticism which rashly challenged the invincible power of Rome, and invited the final catastrophe which made Jerusalem the funeral pyre of an expiring nation.

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How vain to seek for miracles in these most natural events! Josephus, who had visited Rome in the reign of Nero, warned his countrymen against the insanity of defying imperial power, and tells us they were lured to destruction by the ambiguous oracle of Sacred Scripture predicting that, about that time, a Hebrew ruler should become the governor of the habitable earth.' In the hopeless conflict with invincible legions produced by the prophetic superstition, the Hebrews were, therefore, simply vanquished, as Carthage, Gaul, or Britain, by the irresistible power of a great military empire, and in the hour of victory, Vespasian's son finally destroyed the fiction of a Chosen Race miraculously preserved by supernatural power.

Controlled by the common sense of Josephus, the Jews might have remained the prosperous citizens of a Roman province, and escaped the future miseries of a Peculiar People' through gradual amalgamation with surrounding nations. They might even have fulfilled the oracle, through some great Hebrew soldier of

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fortune, proclaimed as emperor by the Roman legions he had led to victory. But, controlled by prophetic fanaticism, they staked national existence on the desperate venture of war with Rome, and, losing all for which they had struggled for sixteen centuries, the flower of their race, snatched from massacre as profitable merchandise, was bought and sold in every slave market of the empire.

Christian theologians affirm that the descendants of the vanquished Jews have remained a PECULIAR PEOPLE for nearly two thousand years in fulfilment of Hebrew prophecy; but has not alleged prediction in this, as in countless other instances, produced its own fulfilment ? The first generations of exiled Jews naturally clung to the traditions of their race, and fostered gradually expiring hope with the promises of the prophets: but, before the time had come for social interaction to absorb them, as in the case of the lost ten tribes, within the family circles of surrounding nations, Christianity assumed the threatening form of religious intolerance, and forced the Hebrew race into a tribal isolation, which their theological enemies have been pleased to call the miraculous fulfilment of prophecy. Can any candid and impartial inquirer, whether Jew or Gentile, question that, if primitive and medieval Christianity had respected the social and political rights of the Hebrew race, in the same spirit of natural justice which now enrols them as the enfranchised, loyal, and prosperous citizens of the most enlightened modern States, they would have long since disappeared from history as a Peculiar People, and become an important element in the fusion of races forming the most civilised nations of modern times?

And if, in that case, some charming Esther or fascinating Rebecca had won the love and shared the throne of a Plantagenet or a Tudor, imaginative theologians, detecting a scion of Hebrew royalty in this queenly daughter of Judah, might re-adjust the orthodox interpretation of prophecy, and tell us that the throne of David had been restored in the modern glories of the British Empire.

The darkest pages in the history of Christianity are those which record the persecution of the Jews; and the pretensions of modern communities to civilisation are measurable by the meed of justice awarded to Hebrew citizens. Can we imagine a more amazing spectacle than Christianity appropriating the sacred literature of a Semitic tribe, adapting it to a new religion, and then persecuting and massacring its owners for proving faithful to their ancestral creed! We might as reasonably claim the Vedas as our own, reconstruct Brahminical theosophy, and insist on Hindoo acceptance of our interpretation under penalty of death.

All this is now, however, changed in the most enlightened communities, where the Jews enjoy a tardy recognition of their just claims as loyal citizens. In Germany, where we might reasonably hope for better things, a mild phase of Judæophobia has been aroused by apparent envy of Hebrew prosperity-in other words, Teutonic Aryans admit the intellectual superiority of their Semitic rivals. But neither Germans, Celts, nor Anglo-Saxons need wonder at being beaten in the race with Jews, whose intellectual heritage extends so many centuries beyond their own. When the founders of noble families in Europe were marauding barons, familiar with every form of violence, the Hebrews were