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." Can one read this and not wonder what Judaism has been about that Lincoln did not even know there _was_ such a church? But call the coming religious reconstruction what you will, what do names matter when all humanity is crucified, what does anything matter but to save it from meaningless frictions and massacres? "Would that My people forgot Me and kept My commandments," says the Jerusalem Talmud. Too long has Israel been silent. "Who is blind," says the prophet, "but My servant, or deaf as My messenger?" He is not deaf to-day, he is only dumb. But the voice of Jerusalem must be heard again when the new world-order is shaping. The Chosen People must choose. To be or not to be. "The religion of the Jews is indeed a light," said Coleridge in his "Table Talk," "but it is as the light of the glow-worm which gives no heat and illumines nothing but itself." Why let a sun sink into a glow-worm? And even a glow-worm should turn. It does not even pay--that prudent maxim of the Babylonian Talmud, _Dina dimalchutha dina_ ("In Rome do as the Romans"). Despite every effort of Jews as individual citizens the world still tends to see them as Crabbe saw them a century ago in his "Borough":-- Nor war nor wisdom yields our Jews delight, They will not study and they dare not fight. It is because they fight under no banner of their own. But the time has come when they must fight as Jews--fight that "mental fight" from which that greater English poet, Blake, declared he would not cease till he had "built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land." To build Jerusalem in every land--even in Palestine--that is the Jewish mission. As Nina Salaman sings--and I am glad to end with the words of a daughter of the lofty-souled scholar in whose honour this lecture is given-- Wherefore else our age-long life, our wandering landless, Every land our home for ill or good? Ours it was long since to join the hands of nations Through the link of our own brotherhood. AFTERWORD