Chosen Peoples by Israel Zangwill — Read

But meantime we are waiting, and the soul "waiteth for the Lord more / than watchmen look for the morning, yea, more than watchmen for the / morning. " Again, as in earlier periods of history, the world lies in / darkness, listening to the silence of God -- a silence that can be felt.

"Watchmen, what of the night? " Such a blackness fell upon the ancient / Jews when Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But, turning from / empty apocalyptic visions, they drew in on themselves and created an / inner Jerusalem, which has solaced and safeguarded them ever since. / Such a blackness fell on the ancient Christians when the Huns invaded / Rome, and the young Christian world, robbed of its millennial hopes, / began to wonder if perchance this was not the vengeance of the / discarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St. / Augustine to create an inner "City of God. " How shall humanity meet / this blackest crisis of all? What new "City of God" can it build on / the tragic wreckage of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel no / contribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But / that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril / from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus. / And it was always an exaggerated quarrel -- half misunderstanding, like / most quarrels. Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was / other than One. Jesus but applied to himself distributively -- as / logicians say -- those conceptions of divine sonship and suffering / service which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theology / of atonement woven by Paul under Greek influences, either of them / might have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism which / its essential genius demands, and which even without them it only just / missed.