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Logic Taught by Love
180

"Take a rest regularly once a week"; they thought:

"The fact that there is a need for a seven days' rhythm in the human organization proves that there is some seven days' rhythm in the creative agency by which man was brought into being." Therefore they made it a matter not only of hygiene but of religion to mark the seven days' rhythm by arousing, each week, impressive and solemn forms of consciousness, as a counter-action to the mechanical drudgery of the other six days. They also utilized, in a similar manner, the changes in family life and the epochs of National history. They felt that as to a man is the regular pulsation of his heart and lungs, so is, to creative wisdom, the complex rhythm of Nature; and they thought too (and were they not right in so thinking?) that nothing is more likely to put man into rapport with living truth than getting his mind to beat in unison with the heart-beats of the unseen Father.

The effect, in those comparatively rare instances in which the discipline was carried out in the true spirit of the Founders, was something like that which is produced in the wood of a violin by the constant repetition of musical notes, or in iron by lying along a magnetic current. The brain of the best kind of Jew is an instrument which catches the property of rhythmic thought by constant contact with the periodic movements of Nature; and at last it becomes an instrument which, when a set of facts is presented to it, the special laws of which are as yet unknown, proceeds to deal with them, spontaneously, according to the laws of Nature and of Logic. It repeats, at every slightest touch, the true rhythm of creative truth. Such a real Jew was called,