Ever since the appearance of Geiger's "Scientific Journal," Jewish philology and Jewish theology have been inseparably connected. To attempt a detailed account of the latter would involve the necessity of frequent reference to the former, an attempt in which we can hardly assume the reader's interest would bear us out. Unwilling to test his patience by such a course, we shall content ourselves with stating the main principles of Reformed Judaism, and briefly indicating the successive steps by which it advanced to its present positions. The one great fact which the Science of Judaism has indisputably established was the fact of evolution in the sphere of the Jewish religion. Each generation had legislated for itself. The authorities of the Middle Ages had introduced changes in the ritual; the Talmud itself, that corner-stone of orthodoxy, was a stupendous innovation on the simplicity of Bible religion.* Applying the theory of evolution to their own case, the modern Rabbis assumed on their part the right to institute whatever changes the exigencies of the age had rendered imperative. * The theory of an Oral Law, delivered to Moses on Sinai and handed down from generation to generation, until it was finally embodied in the ordinance of the Talmudical academies, is a palpable fiction, invented by the Talmudists in order to lend to their own decisions the sanction of Divine authorship. The very fact of change, it is true, presupposes the existence of a substratum that remains unchangeable. What that substratum in the case of Judaism is claimed to be, we shall presently discover. The measures of the Reformers were in the main dictated by the sentiment of patriotism and the desire to remove the barriers that interposed between them and their fellow-men. They would cease to be a "state within-the state," cease to separate themselves from the fellowship of the Gentiles. Hence the leading proposition upon which Reformed Judaism is founded. _The Jewish people have ceased to be a national unit, and will exist hereafter as a confederation of religious societies._