with reason in its turn, and endowed with bea tic adispe text is the rules institutions understand, -ganization is d 'It may be added that the quotations 331 from ss or rder, ature ribe, ents is it ipts the nd of the "machinery" for producing the movement of my life into God's must justify itself as a means to that end; and in my conception of religion's goal I shall have a test to which every conception of faith, atonement, and all else must submit. But I shall want faith, atonement, and all else—all the great old words and the realities they stand for-not less, but more. And this, not in any pale, eviscerated significance-not in any significance which implies juggling with the old words but not really putting them to fair use, but in a significance which leaves them with the full value rendered to them still. When I set myself to achieve a veritable union with God,-a union wherein the only initiative I keep is the initiative of surrender a union wherein God becomes the actual dynamic source of all I am-a union wherein the separateness of my personality is used only to secure its unity with God's, then I shall prize the more warmly all those ringing words and ideas of the New Testament which tell me how God himself, knowing all the obstacles and gloriously conquering them in his wisdom, love, and power, has made it possible for that union to be achieved. New Testament Christianity need have no fear that for him who understands the mystical experience aright one jot or tittle of the religious programme it inculcates will pass away. It is just in that programme that the needed secret will be found. And the religious man, longing for the warmth of the mystic's experience, yet wondering whether in seeking it he may not be divorcing himself from the primary essentials of a true Christian life, may set his misgivings at rest. For if he understand the mystical experience truly, he will through his pursuit of it come to see all the vaster significance in the great New Testament truths of sin, and faith, and incarnation, and Christ, and Cross. So, in the end, under a right understanding of the mystical experience, we see mysticism moving toward reason and reason toward mysticism; and we see mysticism and New Testament Christianity at one. And, with mysticism thus linked with reason on the one hand and with New Testament Christianity on the other, our conception of New Testament Christianity (which through its link with mysticism becomes endowed with fresh depth) becomes, through mysticism's link with reason, linked with reason in its turn, and endowed with fresh reasonableness, too. And so, to speak of "rational mysticism and New Testament Christianity" is to venture upon no union of incompatibles after all: it is to bring together three things whose voices blend, and on whose blended voices there comes the sound of a call we ought to hear. For the whole thing has a practical issue-which is this. Only in driving our religious life up to the mystical heights do we render it at the same time most reasonable and most in accord with the New Testament scheme; because only so do we make the "final fact" for which reason calls, and only so do we use the New Testament "means" for the realization of the New Testament ideal. THE COVENANTERS OF DAMASCUS; A HITHERTO UNKNOWN JEWISH SECT1 GEORGE FOOT MOORE HARVARD UNIVERSITY Among the Hebrew manuscripts recovered in 1896 from the Genizah of an old synagogue at Fostat, near Cairo, and now in the Cambridge University Library, England, were found eight leaves of a Hebrew manuscript which proved to be fragments of a book containing the teaching of a peculiar Jewish sect; a single leaf of a second manuscript, in part parallel to the first, in part supplementing it, was also discovered. These texts Professor Schechter has now published, with a translation and commentary, in the first volume of his Documents of Jewish Sectaries. The longer and older of the manuscripts (A) is, in the opinion of the editor, probably of the tenth century; the other (B), of the eleventh or twelfth. What remains of the book may be divided into two parts. Pages 1-8 of A, and the single leaf of B, contain exhortations and warnings addressed to members of the sect, for which a ground and motive are often sought in the history of the Jewish people or of the sect itself, together with severe strictures upon such as have lapsed from the sound teaching, and polemics against the doctrine and practice of other bodies of Jews. The second part, pages 9-16, sets forth the constitution and government of the community, and its distinctive interpretation and application of the law, what may be called sectarian halakah. Neither part is complete; the manuscript is mutilated and defective at the end, there is apparently a gap between the first and second parts, and it may be questioned whether the original beginning of the work is preserved. The lack of methodical arrangement in the contents leads Dr. Schechter to surmise that 1 Documents of Jewish Sectaries. Volume I. Fragments of a Zadokite Work. Edited, with Translation, Introduction, and Notes, by S. Schechter. Cambridge University Press. 1910. what we have in our hands is only a compilation of extracts from a larger work, put together with little regard for completeness or order. An orderly disposition, according to our notions of order, is not, however, so constant a characteristic of Jewish literature as to make this inference very convincing. Manuscript A was evidently written by a negligent scribe, perhaps after a poor or badly preserved copy; B, which represents a somewhat different recension of the work, exhibits, so far as it goes, a superior text. When it is added that both manuscripts are in many places defaced or torn, it may be imagined that the decipherment and interpretation present serious difficulties, and that, after all the pains which Dr. Schechter has spent upon the task, many uncertainties remain. Facsimiles of a page of each manuscript are given; but in view of the condition of the text a photographic reproduction of the whole is indispensable. The legal part of the book, so far as the text is fairly well preserved, is not exceptionally difficult; the rules are in general clearly defined, and if in the peculiar institutions of the sect there are many things we do not fully understand, this is due more to the brevity with which its organization is described and to the mutilation of the text than to lack of clearness in the description itself. The attempt to make out something of the history and relations of the sect from the first part of the book is, on the other hand, beset by many difficulties. What history is found there is not told for the sake of history, but used to point admonitions or emphasize warnings; and, after the manner of the apocalyptic literature, historical persons and events are referred to in roundabout phrases which envelop them in an affected mystery. Even when such references are to chapters of the national history with which we are moderately well acquainted, as in the Assumption of Moses, c. 5, ff., for example, they may be to us baffling enigmas; much more when they have to do, as is in large part the case in our texts, with the wholly unknown internal or external history of a sect. The obscurity is increased by the fact that the allusions are often a tissue of fragmentary quotations or reminiscences out of the Old Testament, chosen and combined, it seems, by purely verbal association, or taken in an occult allegorical sense. The It may be added that the quotations are singularly inexact. |