Page:The old paths, or The Talmud tested by Scripture.djvu/222

 Jews who make use of the synagogue prayers, have departed from the law and the God of Moses, and have chosen for themselves the doctrines and the gods of the rabbies. How then can God have compassion upon them and gather them? The thing is impossible, until they utterly renounce all these delusions, confess their sin in having followed them so long, and "return and seek the Lord their God and David their king." A long trial has been made of the rabbinical medicine, and it has altogether failed. Wherever the religion of the oral law has been or is predominant, its sway has been marked by the misery of the people. And the first dawn of a happier day has appeared only since the time that a part of the nation burst the fetters of rabbinic superstition. Compare the state of the German Jews with that of their brethren in Turkey or on the coast of Morocco. Some of the former have abandoned the oral law, and the latter still cling to it with a bigoted devotion; and yet the former have had a blessing in the improvement of their temporal and intellectual condition, and the latter still remain in mental and corporeal slavery. The mere renunciation of Rabbinism has produced these beneficial effects, and if the Jews of Europe go on from the renunciation of error to the attainment of truth, that is, if they return to the religion of Moses and the prophets, the promises of God will be fulfilled, and the nation will be restored to the land of their fathers.

The Rabbinic Jews comfort themselves with the idea, that they cannot have this world and the world to come too; but they confound two things which are perfectly distinct, God's mode of dealing with individuals, and his mode of dealing with nations. Individuals have not only an existence in time, but for eternity. Worldly misfortune to an individual is, therefore, no proof of God's displeasure, because the world is only a part, and that the smallest part, of his existence. But the case of nations is different. They exist only in time, and therefore the rewards and punishments must be temporal, and so God has uniformly promised to the Jewish people temporal prosperity, in case of national obedience, and temporal calamity in the former case. Whenever, therefore, we see Israel exiled from their land and scattered among the nations, we must infer, if Moses has spoken the truth, that it is because they have departed from the God of their fathers.