Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/185

Rh in old days, a "Prophet." Moses wished that all the Lord's people should be Prophets. There was a hope that some day the education of Prophets should be complete; that absolute incarnation of rhythmic grace and Logic should become possible. But the idea of so tuning feeling and thought into harmony with natural law, that rhythmic laws, hitherto unknown, should re-echo, or reveal themselves, within the brain, was too overwhelming a conception to enter the average Jewish mind; and unfortunately the rhythmic mode of education is liable to become mechanical. The majority of Jews, in all ages, have supposed that there was some special duty or virtue in observing this or that festival. And, of course, any idolatrous over-tension of this kind impairs mental elasticity, and does away with much of the good result of Jewish discipline. Therefore Judaism has always hitherto been as a frost-bound landscape, illuminated by a few prophetic stars. But modern Science seems now touching it with her magic wand, and crying: "Arise, Shine, for God hath said: 'Let light be'; and the Shekinah of the Lord shall be revealed."

Messiah's Kingdom cannot mean the rule of any one Incarnation, past, present, or to come; the possibility of any such autocracy being a source of permanent health or prosperity is precluded by the very form of those equations according to which (whether we are aware of it or not) we must think whenever we think sanely. An embodied perfection, who shall spare other people the trouble of thinking for themselves, by telling them what they are to do and to believe, may be a suitable ideal for cowards; but no such anomaly can be