Article June 25, 1910 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Charles Stelzle, Charles A. Riley, J. Keir Hardie, Frank Oliver Hall

[Universalist Leader.]

It was the official Israel which quarreled with Jesus at every step. It was able to arouse the mob spirit in the end, and in this way accomplish its desire in the crucifixion of the Galilean rebel. It would be a serious mistake, however, to assume that official Israel was the real Israel, or that it was the greater Israel who killed our Master. As we study the story of that epoch as it is recorded in the Gospels, we are reminded of another Israel which comes to the surface constantly. The stories of Elizabeth and Mary are our opening hint. Those women could not have been isolated and alien products of Palestine. They were village women. They grew up and married in little neighborhoods, far from the cosmopolitan life of their times. Such beautiful, tender plants of sentiment and devotion would wither and never blossom in an uncongenial atmosphere. There must have been something in those villages of Palestine which fed such growths of character. We know that the Messianic hopes of the nation floated around in its soul, but not every wind-blown seed takes root and bears such fruitage. There was a fertile soil there among those little communities. It must be that the light had never died in Israel's real soul; that while the priests at Jerusalem quarreled for place, and ground the face of the people with their exactions, away back on the hillsides in a hundred neglected corners, by village street or in the little cottage where the prophetic spirit of motherhood survived, there must have been stirrings of the spirit, the rustle of wings, the silent songs of brooding hearts keeping their night-watches in Israel's long, dark obscurity.

[Rev. Charles Stelzle in Interior.]

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