they would cry, “Not this Man, but Barabbas.”  That was from the earliest period in the history of the race the watchword of the Hebrews.  Not the man, but the robber.  All that is good and noble and true in manhood—­the mercy, the compassion, the self-sacrifice that are comprised in true manhood—­they cast beneath their feet, they spat upon, they crucified; but all of the Barabbas in man they embraced.  Thus are they become a hissing in the earth, and properly so; for those who hiss at the spirit which has always animated Judaism show that they abhor a thing that is abhorrent.  “All Scripture is profitable,” continued the preacher, “and practically all that is referred to in the text is an indictment of Judaism.  The more earnestly we hold to this truth the greater will be the profit accruing to us from a consideration of the Scripture.  But what more terrible indictment of the Hebrew systems could we have than that which is afforded us in the record that the father of the race had twelve sons?  He had.  But where are ten of them now?  Swept out of existence without leaving a single record of their destruction even to their two surviving brethren.”  He concluded his sermon by stating that he hoped it would be clearly understood that he recognized the fact that in England those members of the Hebrew community who had adopted the methods, the principles, the truths of Christianity even though they still maintained their ancient form of worship in their synagogues, were on a line with civilization.  They searched their scriptures and these scriptures had been profitable to them, inasmuch as they had been taught by those scriptures how impossible it was for that form of superstition known as Judaism to be the guide for any people on the face of the earth.

CHAPTER VIII.

I HOPE THAT YOU WILL NOT EVENTUALLY MARRY AN INFIDEL.

Some of the congregation were greatly disappointed.  They had expected a brilliant and startling attack upon some other Bible personages who had hitherto been looked on with respect and admiration.  But the sermon had only attacked the Jewish system as a whole, and everyone knows that there is nothing piquant in an attack, however eloquent it may be, upon a religious system in the abstract.  One might as well find entertainment in an attack upon the Magnetic Pole or a denunciation of the Precession of the Equinoxes.  No one cared, they said, anything more about the failure of the laws of Moses than one did about such abstractions as the Earth’s Axis, or the Great Glacial Epoch.  It was quite different when the characters of well-known individuals were subjected to an assault.  People could listen for hours to an attack upon celebrated persons.  If Mr. Holland’s book had only dealt with the characteristics of the religion of the Jews, it would never have attracted attention, these critics said.  It had called for notice simply because of its trenchant remarks in regard to some of those Bible celebrities who, it was generally understood, were considered worthy of admiration.