CHRISTIANITY AND THE JEWS In dream I saw two Jews that met by chance, One old, stern-eyed, deep-browed, yet garlanded With living light of love around his head, The other young, with sweet seraphic glance. Around went on the Town’s satanic dance, Hunger a-piping while at heart he bled. _Shalom Aleichem_, mournfully each said, Nor eyed the other straight but looked askance. --ISRAEL ZANGWILL. CHRISTIANITY, long despised and persecuted, had by slow yet steady steps made its way among the nations, until from a creed of slaves it was raised by Constantine to the sovereignty of the Roman world. ♦323 A.D.♦ The cross from being an emblem of shame became the ensign of victory, and the great church of the Resurrection, built by the first Christian Emperor on the hill of Calvary, proclaimed to mankind the triumph of the new religion. But the gospel which was intended to inculcate universal peace, charity, and good-will among men brought nothing but new causes of discord, cruelty, and rancour. Apostles and missionaries are apt to imagine that religion is everything and national character nothing, that men are formed by the creeds which they profess, and that, if you extended to all nations the same doctrines, you would produce in all the same dispositions. The history of religion, however, conclusively demonstrates that it is not churches which form men, but men who form churches. An idea when transplanted into foreign soil, in order to take root and bear fruit, must first adapt itself to the conditions of the soil. The nations of the West in embracing Christ’s teaching assimilated from it only as much as was congenial to them and conveniently overlooked the rest. Mercy--the essence of the doctrine--was sacrificed to the passions of the disciples. Henceforth the old warfare between Jew and Gentile is to manifest itself chiefly as a struggle between the Synagogue and the Church, between the teaching of the New Hebrew Prophet and the Old Hebrew Prophet, so beautifully imagined by a modern Jewish writer in the lines quoted above.