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ON JEWISH PROSELYTISM BEFORE THE WAR OF TITUS.

 an apartment in Rome for the winter and has already asked me to come and see her."

"I don't want you to come for your aunt," said Daisy; "I want you to come for me." And this was the only allusion that the young man was ever to hear her make to his invidious kinswoman. He declared that, at any rate, he would certainly come. After this Daisy stopped teasing. Winterbourne took a carriage, and they drove back to Vevey in the dusk; the young girl was very quiet.

In the evening Winterbourne mentioned to Mrs. Costello that he had spent the afternoon at Chillon with Miss Daisy Miller.

"The Americans — of the courier?" asked this lady.

"Ah, happily," said Winterbourne, "the courier stayed at home."

"She went with you all alone?"

"All alone."

Mrs. Costello sniffed a little at her smelling bottle. "And that," she exclaimed, "is the young person whom you wanted me to know!"




From Fraser's Magazine.

ON JEWISH PROSELYTISM BEFORE THE WAR OF TITUS.

BY FRANCIS W. NEWMAN.

On a broad survey of ancient history, so far as it is well known, it would appear that every national creed became encrusted with fable and error increasing with centuries. Nothing may be thought more puerile and contemptible than the mythology of the "Iliad;" but even in the "Odyssey" we find new growths super-added; and when the historical era of Greece opens, the heroes of the "Iliad" — nay, their attendants — are worshipped as gods; and over the Homeric dynasties a load of malignant sensational legends had been forged and accepted as truth, if not gospel. The marvellous tales of Hercules were magnified and multiplied. The cannibal feast made by Atreus for his brother was become an article of the national faith: to doubt that Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter would have seemed heretical, though Homer knew nothing of it. The amour of the god Neptune with the hero Pelops is gravely alluded to in a religious hymn by the very religious Pindar. The wild story of Œdipus slaying his father and marrying his mother ignorantly, is as old as the "Odyssey;" but later narrators heaped up new horrors; and to be acquainted with this mass of ever-growing folly was esteemed as valuable erudition. Nor can we doubt that several monstrous tales of the gods found in the "Iliad" and in Hesiod were corruptions and misinterpretations of a purer theory. Moral corruptipn went hand in hand with this movement. With the ascendency of the Dorians both hero-worship and the characteristically Greek mania came in: moreover the debauchery systematized in Corinthian and Cyprian temples had no parallel in the earlier times. So much of Greece. But in Egypt the same thing appears. At least it may be broadly stated, that inquirers with one voice avow their belief that the hideous statues of bestial gods and ludicrous devotion of effort for numberless sacred animals, are mere perversions of earlier and reasonable ideas, which received expression in symbols. The religion of Tyre cast off its early cruelties of sacrifice as time went on; but its impurities, unless our informants deceive us, became fixed in the religion, as among the Babylonians in another kind, and as in Egypt. The ancient religion of the Hindoos was noble and pure in comparison to its later stages; and we know that the Buddhist religion, so simple and spiritual with its originator Sakya Muni, has been changed into a carnal sacerdotalism as unlike his doctrine as is Vaticanism to the doctrine of Paul of Tarsus. The religion of Persia suffered depravation between Cyrus and the last Darius. To degenerate seems to be the ordinary fate of national creeds. But perhaps the history of the Hebrew nation shows us one remarkable exception. To define the early state of the national belief might bring us into much controversy; but no one will deny that in its later documents there is a very sensible improvement on the older. A man with whose name all Oxford was well acquainted early in this century — Davison, a friend of Bishop Coplestone and Archbishop Whately — preached a series of Bampton lectures on this very topic — how, in successive "dispensations," juster and juster views of the divine character came forth, till the limited and carnal ideas of Genesis and Exodus were sublimated by psalmists and prophets. It is found difficult to deny that Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter was justified by Leviticus xxvii. 29; but it is certain that such a deed in the times of royalty was as detestable to Hebrew religion as now to us, and could only obtain sanction when a king brought in foreign