Isaac Mayer Wise, founder of the Conference, leader of men and prophet of American Israel! In the true spirit and genius of Judaism he was forward-looking; his eye and face, his heart and mind were turned to the future. The future will achieve the visions and dreams of the prophets, fulfilling the hopes of humanity.

As President, I can not speak of achievements in the past; my work with the Conference is still in the present.

I rejoice that I have been privileged to establish goodwill and to increase the spirit of fraternity and fellowship throughout the Conference.

We need to cultivate the historic sense among Jews of today. The Jew is not modern; he is not a child of yesterday; he is a son of the ancients. Jews of today accept as natural the living Jew without a thought of what keeps him alive. The living Jew among the nations is one of the most marvelous and startling facts of history; yet Israel acts, thinks and feels as though Israel would endure forever, as if nations, races and religions never had perished.

I need but remind you of the great nations of antiquity; Babylon, once mightiest of empires, Egypt, whose ruins portray the eloquent story of its civilization, splendor and power. The worship of Isis and Osiris has ceased; Babylon is being resurrected from the dust. It is wonder of wonders that Israel has not been destroyed. Isaiah's glowing vision that Israel would pass through the fire and not be burned, through the flood and not be overwhelmed, is abundantly proved by Jewish history. "Ye are my witnesses", thunders Isaiah to the Hebrew people. Have we the prophetic power to awaken in American Israel the intense consciousness, the powerful conviction, that the modern Jew is witness for historic Israel-witness to and messenger of the truth for which a whole people has lived and suffered and died through centuries of history?

Our work is with men and women of the twentieth century. It is an age which demands achievement. Man is armed with might as never before in history. We begin the race where past generations have ended. Our ancestors climbed the difficult and dangerous places. We are born on the mountains, and not

in the dark canyons and low valleys. How inspiring the interpretation of Alfred Russell Wallace of modern men as the "inheritors of the accumulated knowledge of all the ages"!

Twentieth century men are the inheritors of the noblest ideals of the human spirit, of the most beautiful thoughts of all human minds, of the most glorious aspirations of the human race. Ideas are international and thoughts are universal. The twentieth century heralds the end of national isolation. The interchange of human ideas is more significant to civilization than the exchange of millions of imports and exports.

We hail the Panama Canal, now completed, as the most marvelous work of engineering, enduring testimony to the scientific skill and wondrous power of man. We welcome the union of the oceans and the opening of the new channel for the commerce of the world. More significant than the symbolic surging together of the tides of the Atlantic and Pacific will be the surging of the human tide, uniting all races and nations.

Material and intellectual progress are undoubted in the twentieth century. Is moral advance also coming? I believe that changes are impending, changes as revolutionary as any which have been established in the physical world-changes in human relationships and in moral practices and in the social order.

Five thousand years of civilization have been bequeathed to us. The torch of civilization is in our hands. We are commanded to carry the light forward, and to keep the light ever burning.

No people of history has a record more glorious than Israel, a lineage more ancient and honorable, a literature unequaled, whose tribute is universal acceptance by mankind, a life of truer loyalty and martyrdom, with distinctive contributions to civilization. Was it not our own American Lowell, who proclaimed the Jew to be the "aristocracy of the earth"? Then noblesse oblige! History has conferred upon us the patent of nobility-let us live as noble men and noble women.

D

CONFERENCE SERMON.*

RABBI MOSES P. JACOBSON.

"Shall we bring forth water out of this rock?" (Num. xx, 10).

The responsibility with whose imposition you, my brethren, have honored me in appointing me to deliver the sermon for this Silver Anniversary of our Conference I accepted, while readily and appreciatively, nevertheless with much misgiving. Expression vital and dignified, yet withal conventional, should probably mark a congratulatory solemnization of this character. But if it be with such proprieties that I am expected to carry off this occasion, I must say, as David said to Saul, I can not proceed with such investiture; it is altogether too heavy for me. I trust that I am not mistaken in the assumption that it is not an oration, but a message which you want.

To him who was the founder of our Conference and its two great parent-institutions no one pays a more reverencing homage than I do in the silent worship of my being. My youth was nourished in the sunshine of his favor. He was my instructor, my counsellor, my inspiration and my friend. I felt the geniality and recognized the greatness of his character. Admiringly and gratefully I realize the grandeur of his accomplishment. But with the years it is more and more impressing itself upon me that the essential value of Dr. Isaac M. Wise for modern Israel consists, not so much in what he did, as it does in what he was in that splendid intrepidity of his with which he broke

*By special action of the Conference, a statement was ordered printed declaring that Rabbi Jacobson's sermon reflects his individual opinions and does not express the views of the Conference.

with his past and, forsaking the shelter of his forebears, led their latest children another magnificent stretch forward along the path of their soul-visioned destiny.

And it seems to me that now, with twenty-five and more years of our loyal building up and perfecting of the constructive work he has bequeathed to us, the time has come for us-while still maintaining the institutions he has left us to change the emphasis of our honor for his performance into a tribute to and an emulation of the man, and to become reformers even as he was a reformer-to reform even upon his reformation, and, if it needs be, to the reversal even of our historic principles and politics.

Of that situation in Israel which is ever uppermost in our thought when we are in conference-namely, our people's attitude towards and interest in our religion-my diagnosis is wholly different from that which the majority of us make.

I have a tremendous respect for the Jewish layman. I do not find him lacking in that indefinable something which we call spirituality. I do not know what this thing spirituality is. The things of sea and sky and common earth, the things of sustenance and of sex, and the graded relations of human society make up the entire sum and substance of all our possible thought, action and sentiment. What other things than a selection of these things of sense can engage the consideration, enterprise and enthusiasm of the spiritual man I can not understand. We are all of us, if you please, simply different kinds of sensualists. But we take this hypocritical term spirituality—a word wholly devoid of analyzable meaning-and frame with it an indictment against a whole people-our people.

The people of Israel are as virtuous a class as there is in civilization. They have sweet homes, pursue useful vocations, make honorable livelihoods, labor on large lines for the welfare of their cities, are interested in the politics of their states and the problems of their countries, and are foremost and generous participants in all causes seeking the relief of poverty, suffering and disadvantage. They are money-makers-as all must be at this time in civilization's day. For money is the life-blood of the public weal. And he who succeeds praiseworthily in money

making, but demonstrates that he is a healthy artery of the social life, functioning for its wholesome maintenance and growth.

With all this community of work and interest knitting our people into an intimate and enthusiastic bond of brotherhood with the whole world of mankind, they maintain, as do all other classes in civilization, a separate union with one another for the purposes of religion. These their religious purposes our people respond to magnificently. Their temples of worship do them credit. I presume it is your experience, as it is mine, that proportionately to our numbers our religious services are attended as largely and with as interested congregations as are those of any other denomination. It is the easiest thing in the world to get the synagog crowded the year round. The hypnotic influence of our holidays, the special services appointed by the hundred and one social reform and philanthropic organizations of the day, the sermons on the sensations of the hour, all bring forth thronging audiences.

But then there comes the lull, the interval of sober reflection, when the thinking man, who can not be fooled all the time, asks, "Where is the distinctive Jewish message in all this? Why have you brought us away from the Egypt of our necessary occupations and our wholesome diversions into all this wilderness of words, thought, theory and excitation to leave us still Jewishly unslaked? Give us here our Jewish vivification if you would have us not Jewishly die in the presence of the very luxuriance of our Jewish acclaims."

Our more definite answers to this interpellation of our laity having been found wanting, we are putting the emphasis today on our historic consciousness. If our people will but intimately acquaint themselves with our wonderful history, if they will but come under the influence of its magic spell, the essence of Judaism, impalpable and indefinable like electricity, will current its quickening impulse through their consciousness and will burst before their vision in a blaze of convincing glory.

But these are the days of analysis. We can no longer be put off with mere phrases and with plausible analogies.

We may prate as we will about the survival of the fittest.