There were times not a few, whilst their own judges ruled, and whilst their own kings reigned in Palestine, when, with a firm grip on the land, but a loose hold on the law, Israel was well-nigh lost and absorbed in the idolatrous peoples by whom it was surrounded; when the race, which was ceasing to worship at the national altars, was in danger of ceasing to exist as a nation. Exile taught them to value by loss what was possession. ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ was the passionate cry in Babylon. Was it perchance the feeling that the land was ‘strange,’ which gave that new fervour to the songs, choking off utterance and finding adequate expression only in the Return? Did Judas, the Maccabee, understand something of this as he led his patriotic, ‘zealous’ troops to victory? Did Mendelssohn forget it when, nineteen hundred years later, he emancipated his people from the results of worse than Syrian oppression, at the cost of so many, his own children among the rest, shaking off memories and duties as lightly as they shook off restraints? Over and over again, in the wonderful history of the Jews, does religion without nationality prove itself as impossible as nationality without religion to serve for a sustaining force in Judaism. The people who, while ‘the city of palm-trees’ was yet their own, could set up strange gods in the groves, were not one whit more false to their faith, nor more harmful to their people, than those later representatives of the opposite type, Hellenists, as history calls them, who built a temple, and read the law and observed the precepts, whilst their very priests changed their good Jewish names for Greek-sounding ones in contemptuous and contemptible depreciation of their Jewish nationality. One inclines, perhaps, to accentuate the facts of history and to moralise over the might-have-beens where these fit into a theory; but so much as this at least seems indisputable--that those who would dissociate the national from the religious, or the religious from the national element in Judaism attempt the impossible. The ideal of the Jews must always be ‘from Zion shall come forth instruction, and the Word of God from Jerusalem’; and to this end--‘that all people of the earth may know Thy name, as do thy people Israel.’ This is the goal of Jewish separateness. The separateness may have been part of the Divine plan, as distinctive practices and customs are due in the first place to the Divine command; but they are also and none the less a means of strengthening the national character of the Jews. Jewish religion neither ‘happens’ to have a national origin, nor does Jewish nationality ‘happen’ to have religious customs. The Jewish nation has become a nation and has been preserved as a nation for the distinct purpose of religion. This, as we read it, is the lesson of history. And this too is its consolation. The faithful few who see the fulfilment of history and of prophecy in a restored and localised