Liberia ^ 



are the folklore of Genesis, the trivial and often silly pre- 

 scriptions of Leviticus, the confused and bloody wars of petty 

 Syrian tribes a thousand years before Christ, the dismal 

 ravings of Jeremiah or of the minor prophets ? Christianity 

 may not appeal to some races or individuals as a divine revela- 

 tion — it depends on the definition one would dare to give to 

 the adjective " divine " ; but so far, the world has known 

 nothing like the simple teaching of Christ for the perfection 

 of religion. We are only beginning to appreciate it now. 

 Unhappily, not many years after the death of Christ, men of 

 second-rate, third-rate, fifth-rate insight and intelligence began 

 to overload His direct teaching with more or less nonsensical 

 dogma — dogma of absolutely no profit either to human intelli- 

 gence, morality, or life. 



Worshipping, as they do, the Old Testament, they are 

 strong Sabbatarians ; that is to say, they transfer to Sunday 

 the rigid respect given to Saturday by the Jews, coupled, of 

 course, with the spiteful mortification ot poor human flesh 

 which began with Pauline Christianity. 



In this of course, as in other things, they will not resist 

 the emollient tendencies of modern civilisation. They will 

 learn that true religion is not to be reserved for one day in 

 the week only ; that one day of rest in the seven is absolutely 

 necessary to humanity, but that the day of rest^ — more or 

 less compulsory rest — should not be associated with dreariness, 

 or dissociated from every lawful form of happy enjoyment. 

 Their newspapers will cease to devote a large portion of their 

 space to profitless examination papers on the Old Testament ; 

 and one may begin to hope that there, as in America and in 

 Protestant England, some surcease may be given to the bestowal 

 of Jewish names. Let the Jews by all means style themselves 

 with expressions derived from the Hebrew language ; but 



358 



