not depart from Judah until Shiloh came (Gen. xlix. 10); that He should be born of a 'Virgin' (Isa. vii. 14); that the place of His birth should be Bethlehem (Mic. v. 2, 3); the time, during the existence of the second temple (Mal. iii. 1); exactly 490 years after the commandment to rebuild Jerusalem (Dan. ix. 25); that His preaching should be first heard in Galilee (Isa. ix. 2); that He should be a stone of stumbling (Isa. viii. 14); that He should be scourged, buffeted, and spit upon (Isa. 1. 6; lii. 14); that His hands, feet (Ps. xxii. 16), and side should be pierced (Zech. xii. 10): that the sword of God's justice should smite Him who was the Lord's fellow (Zech. xiii. 7); and that the Messiah should be cut off, but not for Himself. This and kindred evidence was adduced. And it was also shown that however the rationalistic party amongst the Jews at the present day might deny the Messianic bearing of these prophetic announcements, they were acknowledged by all the ancient Jewish interpreters as veritable predictions of the Messiah, and which were most remarkably fulfilled, as is universally admitted, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and that consequently He must be the Messiah. In answer to the question, 'Why did not the Jews accept Jesus as such? ' the preacher showed that the prevalent ideas concerning the temporal glory of their expected King received too rude a shock, their pride and prejudice were wounded at the lowly birth and spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom; and that the prophecies which related to the sufferings of Christ were felt to be so great a difficulty by Jews, even at the present day, that the Talmudists of the middle ages had invented the theory of a double Messiah, one to suffer and another to reign; but that such attempts were alike contrary to the plain meaning of Scripture, and to the ancient criticism and teaching of the Jewish church, which expose the utterly untenable nature of their position. Mr. Stern also showed that the doctrine of the Trinity was revealed in the Old Testament, set forth and authenticated by their most ancient books, and that the acceptance of Chris tianity by them was not a forsaking of the faith of their forefathers, but rather a returning to the religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; that Christianity was not a new religion, but the natural result and development of the germinal truths and principles of the old; thus the one was but the complement and completion of the other. The service and sermon were of a most solemn and edifying character." THE JEWS IN AUSTRALIA. AMONGST the neglected classes of population which either are not confined to Sydney, or belong altogether to the country, are the Jews. The census of 1871 returned 2,895 Hebrews in the colony, and there must be now more than 2500. And for these nothing whatever is directly and specially attempted by the Christian Churches. In Sydney there are two Synagogues, and two or three Rabbis, one of whom is a gentleman of conspicuous learning and ability; and thus Judaism is fixed and rooted in our midst, and the Jews are carefully fortified in their antagonism to Christianity. There are no Syna gogues, nor is there any organised Jewish worship, I believe, elsewhere in the colony, but there are a considerable number of this people scattered through the provincial towns. And it must be conceded to these "children of Israel" that they are highly intelligent, industrious, and respectable. Poverty, in its extreme forms, appears to be a very infrequent thing among them. In the competitions of commerce they occupy a very honourable and powerful place. In the competitions of politics, they have proved themselves capable and worthy of the highest municipal and parliamentary honours. In social life, they are distinguished for their generosity. But though one were to enumerate all the virtues, and they are many, of the Jews of New South Wales, yet is it evident that they lack many of those elements of character which only the Kingdom of Christ in the soul can generate. Pre-eminently there is among them a devotion to wealth and pleasure extreme that it has become proverbial. And worse than all is their utter rejection of our Lord Jesus Christ, the true and living Saviour of the world. While they proudly, defiantly, and mockingly set at nought the Redeemer, how sad is their position. Cannot anything be done for these precious souls? Shall we wait for them to lay aside their prejudices, and sit at our feet that we may teach them the truth as it is in Jesus? Then, unless human nature undergoes a revolutionary change, we must wait a long while; for few of the Hebrews become inquirers, self-moved. Whether there are any missions to the Jews in these colonies, I do not know, but we all know that in London and elsewhere such missions have been conducted with very rich issues. Only yesterday I had the pleasure of a genuine Christian talk with widely-known and esteemed Congregational Minister, who was originally a Polish Jew, but became a disciple of Jesus, through the instrumentality of the Mission to the Jews in London. And, I repeat, cannot anything be done for these people in our midst? Cannot the sects unite to do something? Is it impossible to win the Jews to Christ? May we not even try? Would not prayer, and the Christian voice, and an appropriate literature (such as "the Hebrew Christian Witness") accomplish something? The first and grandest Christians were won from the Jews by Christ and His apostles, and the sooner we return to the old quarry the better.Sydney Christian Advocate and Wesleyan Record. JUDAISM ON THE THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY. BY THE REV. M. WOLKENBERG. To meet argument with passion, or to have recourse to abuse for the purpose of silencing a logical and inconvenient opponent, is proverbially tantamount to a tacit admission of weakness, and tends only to confirm the position taken up by a calm and self-possessed reasoner. Truth, and more particularly religious truth, when addressed to people of different persuasions, is not always pleasant. Though spoken in love, and presented in as agreeable a form as is consistent with its distinct and unequivocal enunciation, it nevertheless repels those who wilfully shut their eyes against it. This is quite natural. Cool and impartial judges, will therefore draw their own conclusions from the coarse invective and vituperative virulence with which we are invariably met by our Jewish antagonists. They will gauge the correctness of the facts stated by us by the wrathful ebullitions which they have occasioned, and by the utter absence of any thing like proof in their summary denial and rejection. In a former issue of the HEBREW CHRISTIAN WITNESS, some remarks were made on a most solemn occasion, and therefore not in the heat of controversy, respecting the expiring moments of unbelieving Israelites, which gave deep umbrage to the 'Jewish World." Far be it from us to insult the Anglo-Hebrew Community by identifying them with this scurrilous organ. The former are, as a body, far too honourable and altogether incapable of first attributing to us gratuitous utterances and then exhausting the Billingsgate vocabulary in denouncing them. We might as well take up some low publication, and assert that it represents English opinion, as maintain that the so-called Jewish press, reflects the views generally entertained by the respectable portion of that people. We never did say, we never could have said, that " remorse is preying upon the minds of Jews for not having, during their life-time, acknowledged the Christian Deity," whose claims to recognition as such they have never seriously examined. Snch an assertion might be justly characterised not only as a flagrant and unhallowed falsehood," but as in the highest degree preposterous. In describing the last moments of the adherents of modern Judaism, it was said that "they were invariably marked by total absence of peace even in the case of such Jews who had been most consistent in their religious observances. Eternity," it was added, "in all its appalling mysteriousness is inexorably present, and there is no 66 66 thing tangible and reliable to sustain We have said that in the rejection in their belief in the impossibility of a Divine revelation; and recognising no other standard of moral obligation than that set up by their own conscience, to which they probably adhered with all possible strictness, they may have felt resigned in viewing the approach of death. They could be inspired by no certain hope of happy enjoyment beyond it; for such a hope can only spring from positive revelation, and cannot be based on logical demonstration. But as such a revelation does not exist for the deist, he may just submit with what is called philosophic calmness to the awful and inexorable change which he is undergoing, and of whose issues he is completely ignorant. Of course, this is only a mere supposition. But how is it with the Jew who professes to believe in the God of Israel and a final judgment, and who knows enough of a future state to fill him with terror, but ab solutely nothing of a reliable nature to relieve his apprehensions when in view of it? Is "the death of such an Israelite ordinarily peaceful and calm?" Can it possibly be so? It is said of the great Stagirite, that when in the face of his approaching dissolution, he was heard to exclaim :"A wailing babe came I into the world, in trouble and sorrow have I passed through it, and now I go I know not whither: oh! Cause of all causes, have mercy upon me!"-that poor heathen philosopher had never heard of a divine revelation in its true sense. His vast reasoning powers could give him no light on his eternal destiny. and hence his instinctive dread of death, and his exceedingly touching cry for mercy to the Deity whom he could not even name. The modern masters in Israel would have ridiculed his fears, or would, perhaps, have expounded to him, in high-sounding phrases, the sublime doctrines of liberal Judaism, which ensures salvation to everybody-heathen, Mohammedan, Jew, and Christian. They would have told him in effect, and on the authority of divine revelation, that belief in that revelation was quite unnecessary and superfluous, and that everybody could be saved without it. Unfortunately for them, we have Aris totle's exact counterpart in one of th renowned pillars of Judaism. In tract B'rachoth, page 68, it is related: -"When Rabbi Jochanan, the son of Zachai, was sick, his disciples came to visit him. On seeing them he began to weep. They said unto him, Rabbi, light of Israel, right pillar and strong hammer! why weepest thou? He replied, Should I not have wept if I had been brought before an earthly king, whom one day only separated from the grave, whose anger, therefore, could not last for ever, who could neither torment nor inflict eternal death upon me and whose wrath I might appease with words, or conciliate with a bribe? And shall I not weep now when I am entering into the presence of the King of kings, who lives and abides throughout the countless ages of eternity, whose possible anger with me and the torture and death which He may inflict upon me are of equal duration, and whom I can neither appease with words nor conciliate with a bribe? Here are two ways before me, one leading to hell, and the other to paradise, and I know not which I am entering." What! that "light of Israel" utterly in the dark and full of terror on his death-bed! What! did the breath of eternity suddenly extinguish the torch of Judaism, which had illumined his paths all his life? Was he no better off than the poor benighted heathen? If, therefore, the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! If the whole system of Judaism broke down so completely in the case of the very first representative authority among the Jews, is it at all conceivable that the death of an Israelite is ordinarily peaceful and calm ?" What then is there in Judaism to inspire him with a single ray of hope and to awaken the regret of a dying Hebrew Christian at having renounced it? Did not the despairing rabbi believe in the "Omniscient Unity," and was he not "unswerving to the end in his love for the Almighty Father?" Oh! ye gentlemen of the Jewish press, and all ye rabbis and advocates of sophistical cobwebs and vain delusions, pause a little before you attack and abuse us; restrain your heedless impetuosity, and leave off sound 64 ing your own praises. Open your eyes for once and examine the foundation on which you build for eternity. The heathen philosopher, in his vain but unutterable craving for light, may have derived some comfort from the very intensity of his prayers, and died with a smile on his face. He could not be disturbed and agitated by the Divine command ringing in his ears, "Be ye holy, for I the Lord your God am holy," or with the declaration that "God is of purer eyes than to behold evil," and that he desires truth and purity in the innermost parts. You on the contrary, like Rabbi Jochanan, know enough, and profess to believe in a future judgment according to the immutable laws of Sinai, but you have absolutely nothing to fall back upon, by which you may REASONABLY hope to temper their extreme but just severity. You cannot destroy the Divine attribute of infinite justice by leaning on that of mercy, and it is equally impossible for you to reconcile them and blend them harmoniously together. Your Rabbi Jochanan knew and felt this insurmountable barrier in his way to eternal happiness and hence his despair. It may be said, however, that Rabbi Jochanan lived in what the late Mr. Deutsch would have called the Mishnic period, when Judaism had not yet reached its meridian splendour and its full Talmudic development.* It is true the Jews were then still in Palestine, surrounded by the external symbols, at least, of God's presence among them, and in the enjoyment of the Levitical ordinances and other means of access to the Source of truth, of which they were subsequently deprived in a manner so terrible as to remove all doubt as to their utter abandonment by "the Almighty Father." But this total eclipse of Divine light among them has been entirely ignored by the rabbis. In opposition to their own liturgical prayers and Talmudi *He is supposed by some to be identical with the John mentioned in Acts iv. 6. Contrast his darkness and terror of death with the light and holy joy manifested by the apostles in the immediate prospect of eternity. cal dicta, the unparalleled calamities inflicted upon the nation are, in controversy, represented by them as the birth-pains which ushered in heavenborn Judaism in all its effulgent brightness and completion. Unlike, therefore, Rabbi Jochanan, who was still in comparative darkness, the modern Jew enjoys the full blaze of Judaic light as revealed in the inspired pages of the Talmud, which opens up eternity to his view, dispels his darkness on his way to it and enables him to confront the king of terrors peacefully and calmly. We shall avail ourselves of that light in our inquiry into the hopes and expectations cherished by a Rabbinic Jew on his death-bed, and then try to ascertain those which sustain one of the reformed party. JUDAS ISCARIOT REDIVIVUS. THE Finsbury Oracle of the 20th ult., has delivered itself of the following characteristic utterance : "More windfalls for the happy secretaries, missionaries, and touters of the Societies for Promoting Christianity among the Jews! A lady, whose will has been recently proved, has left one of these plethoric institutions a legacy of £2,000-two thousand pounds!-while naked wretches are starving in squalid hovels, and the hospitals crying out for help!" If the self-appointed leader of the Jewish mind of England meant to pass off the above coarse piece of offensive insolence as original wit, he presumed too much upon the supposed ignorance of the generality of his Jewish readers. The ebullition is but an indifferent copy of the speech of a certain Jewish thief, who pretended for a time to follow Christ, if haply he might steal something from His true disciples. Here is the original story:-" Then The former are replete with touching confessions of sins as the cause of the extinction of Divine light; and the latter acknowledge frequently the superior knowledge possessed by the ancients. "If the ancients were angelic, we are but human," is a characteristic saying of the Talmud; "but if the ancients were only human, we are but as donkeys." Such is the progressive and civilising efficacy of Judaism ! Jesus, six days before the passover, came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom He raised from the dead. There they made Him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with Him. Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her hair and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray Him, Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor? This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but Me ye have not always."* Simon's son, though remorse had driven him to put an end to his wretched existence, has not left himself without successors. The traitor's succession extends to our own day. We constantly hear derogators of the Redeemer's glory talk in the would-be charitable strain of the presiding genius over the Finsbury Jewish print. Not that they care for the poor, but they covet the money spent to promote the Redeemer's glory, by promoting His everlasting Gospel. Does the Finsbury Oracle know how much that pious lady, whose will has recently been proved, had bestowed upon the starving and the sick? It is too well known that those who care most for the poor and sick at home are they who are zealous in promoting the Redeemer's glory both at home and abroad. Our Saviour evidently coupled the preaching of the Gospel with Mary's act:"Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this Gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her."† Verily, the medium at the Finsbury Square Jewish Printing Office, must have evoked the spirit of Judas Iscariot, which indited the above exquisitely benevolent and chaste morsel. |