Break dream of delight from pillow of misery, what thank get you from the sleeper you have recalled to his despair? Conscious of its gauziness, the Jew caressed his dream and resented its disturbance. "At thine extremest, Jew, to His cause and thine, comes the sudden God!" So charmed him his prophets of the time. Deluding, because themselves deluded, prophets in his heart he felt them, but in the same heart doated on their message, and yearned to think it true. For while with equal scale hung poised the war, as for three doubtful years hang poised it did (A.D. 132–135), his illusion was the hasheesh of his life. The final tug, to human seeming, was sure to wrestle him to sod. But, again, Jehovah to help, why should not human foresight be confounded, and trumpets of triumph yet blare to the world the victory, the independence, the kingdom of God, and of the Jew? Illusion hollow even to himself. Yet leave it him. The struggle will not, but might, end in his favor. So leave him his exaltation, his trance, his rapture. It will muscle his arm and impassion his sword to the last. And if then must perish Judea, let then his arm wither, and his sword go rust in the blood and ruins of undone Jerusalem. For, fronted his daring and endurance, the daring, the endurance and, dreader far, as well he knew, the illimitable reinforcements of Rome; and, to his gaze on the contrast, unrolled before him the spectacle of his doom.

But, Messiah?

In trust of heavenly rescue at the last, to the last, sanguine though fearful, fought his multitudes in fight of desperation. And thus communed with himself the thoughtful Jew, "Come, the end, nor yet Messiah; what?" Extreme to extreme, would not then, among his credulous, superstition plunge in Atheism? And even among his devoutest, would not that "Son of Man," the "elect one," the "Messiah," Son of God, Head of Jewry, and the Kingdom of God on earth, wane, an illusion on the sky of a weary faith, and fade in fine to a spectre of fancy on the eyeballs of despair? So 87 Book of Enoch xlvi. 1, 2; xlviii. 2, 5; civ. 2.

must then have feared the meditative Jew. And, apparently, all but Akiba, so feared the Rabbis. But, girt in outer unity as was he by his Law of Moses, so cohered he in unity within by his common longing for his Messiah.

As man, or nation, when saddest on the religious Jew settled the clay of life, highest then sought he in soul to God. And when to heart and flesh came pause of prayer, bore he from it, as from our heavenly trystes bear we, impress, consciousness, deposit of God. His "Holiness," called it Moses. His "Light and Truth," the Psalmist. In the sorrow but hope of the Captivity it took form and person, and on lip of prophet and in pulse of people, leaped, Messiah. Pondering the crisis provoked by Barcocheba often must have said to himself the contemplative Jew, if then such Jew there were, exploded this false Messiah and expectation wrecked again, what hinders shake of faith in the best of us towards the True? And there an end? To the nation, yes. But not to the people, not to the Jew, not to the Jew's Messiah. For, surmounting the fall of Jerusalem the desolation of Judea, nor exhaling, as some feared, from the faith of the defeated, as of yore to the fathers so again to the sons, Pillar of Fire, his Messiah lit the Jew on his tread of pain through the midnight misery of his second wilderness in the long Dark Ages. Mirk enough these even to the foremost among the Gentiles. Yet to them flickered sometimes through the gloom auroras of a sunshine yet to come. But from his horizon, on his habitation, of any hope, cheer, prospect of betterment in the future, fell there never a gleam. Darkness," thick darkness, darkness which might be felt," isolating him from the common wealth of humanity, belted him, home and household, and immured him from mankind, the leper of the world. Yet, blackness as of Egypt without, within, it was then as it had been before when "all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings." 38 For, door closed, blinds drawp, on hearth, Nor, medley of earthly and heavenly promise as was always the Messiah of the Jews, has He to this present

Messiah!

88 Exodus x. 23.

forgotten His devotee. Plucking him from his Ghettos, He has mounted him on thrones unpurpled, but golden, there to press hands on the Exchequer of the nations, arbiter of peace, war, and every movement of moment among the Gentiles, because autocrat of the finances of the world. For the roy

alty of the Messiah of the Jew, though of heaven, was to be a royalty on earth. And there, in time, tne Jew bids fair to establish it. But let us back to the Jew of Barcocheba in the gloom of his lost Culloden.

Sunk to silence the bray of the war, half its horrors under sod, its saddest half moaning in a thousand homes of misery, gone his fantasics, but fast his faith, and, like spent tem. pest that has lost its heart, empty his for a while of his turbulent Messiah, thinking back on his headlong rush to the ensigns of Barcochab, what of him and his evaporated enthu siasm thinks now the reflecting Jew? That, as Isaiah says to him, his "strength for the present, is to sit still." 39 And for a good while thereafter still he sat, and muffled his contempt of himself in snarls at his impostor" Bar-cochaba, Son of a Star, said he, Barcosba, Son of a Lie!

After his overthrow by Titus, in his every revolt against Rome, and specially in this last under Hadrian (A.D. 132135), to the thought of the Jew his every defeat fell on him from frown of God. But sanguine throughout, thought he always that in his next battle, or its next, his glancing battalions would glitter surely under shine of the Shekinah. Did not Prophecy head his van, and Fate impulse his rearward? Aye, But to other issues than he thought of. Unfevered by the extasy in his, others' eyes foresaw curt farther course for him, and at its close, doom. For in mass and resistance as a wall heaven high against him, in numbers and might resistless as the sea, in discipline, domineering victory, in valor of fire almost his match, in valor of iron, tension, tug, his superior, fronting the Jew and his next audacity, if he dared one, stood await the stern omnipotence of Rome. Inexpugnable? Perhaps. Unassailable? He would try. And

89 Isaiah xxx. 7.

mauling every boss and buckler of its mightiness, at last like a champion of the Mid Ages full knightly fell he on his shield. No moan for him be made. Against a banded world, against catastrophe inevitable, he fought the fight, and found the death, of the brave. As against the scorn of the world on much of what, later, he became, let clash the cymbals, shrill the fife, and roll the drum, above the grave where droops the Memory of what once he was.

Rev. A. G. Laurie.

ARTICLE XXVII.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hosea Ballou.

SCARCELY two contemporaneous New Englanders could be more unlike than these in environment. Yet when brought into association we find their kinship vital.

In outward fortune and personal relations they were extremely different.

Emerson's heritage was the best New England in his day, could give. Born in wonderful, enviable, self-conceited Boston, of blue-red blood; a son of a clergyman, yet, strange to say, inheriting a worldly competency; in early manhood a Unitarian, hence an idolator of literary culture; a graduate of Harvard; successor of Henry Ware in a Boston pulpit; a student of various literatures and of art in its masterpieces; an observant and favored traveller in countries of the old world; possessing from first to. last, and especially in his later years, the grace of cultured leisure, there would seem to be nothing wanting in his external life-school for his round. self-development.

Hosea Ballou was born in an obscure country town, Richmond, N. H., the thirteenth child of a poverty-stricken Baptast precher. Fear of hunger for his family kept him in his boyhood at hard manual labor in the field. At nineteen he

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had not attended school one day; he had then barely learned to read. The only book with which he became familiar in his boyhood was the Bible. Destitute of means of literary culture, the scope of his early mental vision was necessarily

narrow.

But rooted even in this unlikeness are some points of resemblance.

Fifty years ago Unitarianism was Puritanism slightly modified. It broke from the so-called Orthodoxy of the previous age on the single doctrine of the Trinity. It ventured no denial of the old reputed orthodox doctrine of total depravity, both as applied to human nature and the Divine Character. It regarded the Bible, not as a human history of divine inspirations, but as every word a literally direct utterance of God. In common with the older sects, which it sought to propitiate, it worshipped a God who, it was virtually imagined, had retired from active participation in the affairs of the universe. It expected of its preachers only a parrot-like repetition of dead phrases. It aimed to save the elect by conjuring up a mild fright over "belated ghosts." Its little company of the elect was all to be selected from graduates of Harvard College; it was even an undecided question whether any one who had not pursued the full course of the Harvard Divinity School could be worth saving.

Against this tendency, this repression, this narrowness, Ralph Waldo Emerson at the age of thirty made a brave protest. He did not have, and he never had, the scholar's spirit of patient research. He made no thorough study of the letter of the Bible. He did not, like the more conservative Channing, attempt to sound its spiritual deeps. Like Theodore Parker, he hastily assumed the Bible taught of God's chronic anger and a medieval inferno. From such a New Testament and such an Old Testament, he turned to the Older Testament written in human nature. He did what was manly for him to do under the circumstances he left the pulpit. He discarded all external authority; he hushed all other voices that he might listen for what his own soul