THE RELATION OF SEMITICS TO RELIGION 83 



It was from places such as this that the foul fiends of Jerusalem plu- 

 tocracy could be seen stripped of all the softening airs of gentility, 

 that the bones of the peasant and husbandman, of the widow and 

 orphan could be seen, ground, as in the fable, to make bread for the 

 plutocrat giants of Jerusalem. What message had Micah for Jeru- 

 salem? He had the only message that was possible for one in his 

 situation, a message flatly opposed to the assuring words of Isaiah. 



" Zion is built with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity, 

 Therefore, Zion for your sake shall be plowed as a field, 

 And Jerusalem shall become heaps, 

 And the temple hill as the heights of a forest." 



What have we here when we look at the very best, that which is 

 instinct with life and moral righteousness? Everywhere we see the 

 man as a mirror of the higher types of his kind ; everywhere the play 

 of natural forces, of common, or peculiar, historical and social con- 

 ditions. If you turn to the less attractive features of prophecy, you 

 will find them, for example, in the later parts of the book of Isaiah 

 baseless visions of future splendor, mammoth desires for worldly 

 riches, Jerusalem to be the sacred coffer into which all the wealth of 

 the heathen shall be poured, Gentiles crowding day and night with 

 all their treasures to her open gates, the fat rams of Nebaioth smok- 

 ing upon her altars, high over her towers and temple and lighting 

 up the Holy City Yahwe shedding forth a divine effulgence, the 

 Jews now gathered from the ends of the earth, in lieu of all their 

 suffering and ignominy, shall feast on the fatness of the Gentiles, 

 mumble the beads of the Jewish rosary, and, as for the rest, since 

 there shall be no more need of work or business for them, sit like the 

 anchorites of old in rapt and holy contemplation. How startlingly 

 human all that is! Certainly if in the sublimer lines of Holy Writ 

 we see distinctly the figure of the human impressed in brighter 

 colors upon the page, we here see the darker shadow of the human 

 heart in these ecstatic and baseless visions of impoverished and 

 persecuted Jews. Now I say without fear of successful contradiction 

 that the study of Semitics, even of the book itself, which we all love 

 and revere, is leading gradually but surely to the bringing of it 

 forth from the holy seclusion and isolation to which it has been so 

 long consigned. It is working toward ridding this old literature from 

 the evil of dehumanization, partial or complete, to which a devout 

 but uninformed piety unfortunately subjected it. 



I need not here refer to the work which has been accomplished in 

 the last decades in the field of the Old Testament by Historical 

 Criticism. The Pentateuchal books, instead of being the work of one 

 author, Moses, who in the field of legislation was divinely inspired 

 to horoscope the unborn centuries and write ante factum a complete 

 code applicable to the minutest details of a future nation's needs, 



