THE JEWS AND THE GENTILES.
By Jos. Clarke
Once it was customary for the Jew to look down from his high position upon the Gentile, as all unworthy his regard or respect; now the Gentile, in his turn, despises the Jew, whose ancestors urged on the Roman governor Pilate to crucify the Son of God. The Gentile nations, in their zeal to honor their crucified Lord, have done all in their power to destroy the Jew, and in their treatment of this outcast people have shown all the cruelty and bitter persecution that was manifested by the Jews in their treatment of Christ and his followers. These nations, in their blind and bitter rage and contempt for the Jews, and whatever they have imagined was peculiar to them, have made a fatal and lamentable mistake. Like all narrow-minded bigots who usurp the sword of the persecutor, they have set aside reason and truth, and have allowed passion, and bigotry, and ignorance, to rule the day, until they really think they are doing God service in compelling the Jew to abandon, in effect, the old, time-honored institution of the Sabbath. Do they think to convince the Jew that God has set aside the fourth precept of the decalogue? or, failing in this, to weary the poor Israelite with customs and statutes, heavy and oppressive, until he abandons the most excellent of all the laws of his fathers? Are not the Gentile nations responsible for the violence and oppression which the Jews have undergone in the past? Do they think thus to please the Lord, who prayed his Father to forgive his persecutors? The prophets foretold the troubles which would come upon the Jews, but did they justify the cruelty of the oppressor? But the anti-Jew spirit went beyond all bounds when it attacked the ancient Sabbath of the Lord, which was made for Adam and all his race, and in itself is an institution world-wide in its scope and influence. But the responsibility of Sabbath desecration rests upon the nations of Christendom, which, to carry out their dislike for the Jew, have foisted into their creed a day unknown to the sacred writers; and this day they blindly, persistently, put forward as the true Sabbath, without regard to evidence. And it is a sad comment upon Gentile policy that thus they are weakening the Jew in the little virtue he may yet possess. Jos. Clarke.