For this reason the gentlemen who stated the object of the Society in the constitution of the Harvard Menorah Society were compelled to take into consideration the following historic fact: There was a time in the history of mankind when religion and life were coincident. You know that the prophets were reformers. The orthodox religion which they fought was the religion of the land. They were progressive religionists, just as the gentlemen who are in the Reform sect to-day claim to be progressive religionists. When they established their religion, _it_ became the religion of the whole nationality, for all ancient religion is national religion. Religion for the Greeks, and religion for the Jews, and religion for the Syrians, and for the Babylonians, and the Romans, was essentially national and political, and the political nationalism of religion in the time of the Roman Empire was the immediate basis for the persecution of the Jews by the Romans. The latter persecuted the Jews not primarily because they disliked the Jews, but because the Jews were a political danger in their refusal to worship the representative of the State in the shape of the Emperor. But in the development of civilization, religion became detached from the totality of civilized living. In the progressive division of labor religion became specialized. The priestly group learned to confine itself more and more to the "things of the spirit"--cult, ritual, dogma, while the other elements in civilization loomed larger and larger. Religion remained social, but society was no longer religious. Life was secularized. I think that the representatives of the Reform sect, in one of their conferences, declared that America is not a Christian country. In so doing they acknowledged this fact. _Continuity of the Jewish Spirit_ Throughout the history of the Jewish people, there is a continuity of spirit which is very different from the continuity of form that attends both the secular and the religious developments of Jewish life. This is the same in both these aspects of Jewish life--in the secular Jewish poetry and thought of the middle ages and up to the present day. Even a Bergson, ostensibly a Frenchman, expresses in his philosophy what is essentially the Hebraic conception of the nature of reality and the destiny of man. From Amos through Job, through the philosophers of the middle ages, to Ahad Ha-'Am there is a clear and accountable continuity. Finally, there is the development of the whole of the secular life of modern Jewry, in Yiddish and in Hebrew. Yiddish may be unpleasant, but Yiddish is no less the speech of the Jews than English, no less the speech of the Jews than Aramaic, and Arabic and Ladino, and all of these have acquired literary and qualitative characteristics which are identical as expressions of the spirit of the Jew, of the Hebraic spirit.