If we were to try to define this true priesthood, might we not say that a priest is one who, reaching out after the higher and better than himself, helps others onward too, bringing to them something to which they could not of themselves have attained, who shares his good with his fellows and takes upon himself their ill, making communion possible for them, because he has entered into communion with them himself. But it is not easy thus to summarise in a sentence a work which is in truth as wide as human life; wherever a man interprets [p.101] in the terms of his own day the unseen and enduring realities, and helps those about him to view things in their true relations, he is performing a priestly function; whenever he takes up their disadvantages as his own, in fellowship with suffering, and shares with others willingly the result of their own wrong-doing, then is he doing a part of the priest's divinest work. The germ of such an ideal of priesthood may be seen in far-off days. The family priesthood of the Hebrew patriarchs, and of the early ages of Israel, contains, unconsciously at least, the promise of it, and in a wider form it formed the subject of the noblest prophetic appeal: Israel was called to be a nation of priests, revealing to other peoples the message of God.[23] It may be said, too, that the later history of the Jewish nation has shown in practice the value of the simple family priesthood of the parent, in keeping alive a faith which from the destruction of the temple down into the late Middle Ages was cherished and maintained entirely without the help of a professional ministry. Even when after the time of Maimonides, the rabbis began to be paid for the time which they took from other work to devote to the exposition of the Law for the benefit of others, there was still no arbitrary division between clergy and laity. The human centre of Jewish religious life is not the rabbinic ministry, but the lay priesthood of the family. [p.102]