The magazine with the poem in it is received--beautiful and graceful I find the latter. I wish the additions to the “Songs” were not limited--but the publishers do not wish to enlarge the volume too much. We shall have two poems by Emma Lazarus; one of them Mr. Whittier tells me he considers her best--“The Crowing of the Red Cock.”
Your letter interests me exceedingly. I grew up under the influence of old-fashioned Puritanism, and from it drew the idea that Jew and Christian were really one, only they did not understand each other.
Children do construct their own theology oftener than is thought, I believe. The Puritan was like the Hebrew in many ways, most of all in his firm hold of moral distinctions, in his belief in the One God as the God of righteousness and truth.
Certainly no one ever insisted upon obedience to the law more positively than Christ himself. We Christians do believe in Him as the human manifestation of God: that is the one distinctive element of our faith.
All sorts of strange doctrines have been built up about this idea.
I care for none of them, but rest upon what is to me a spiritual certainty--“Truly this _is_ the Son of God.”
I emphasize the “_is_” because to me that visible life was only one phase of His eternal presence in and with humanity. To me He is “the living Lord”--the Spirit bearing witness to our spirits of their own immortal meaning; and so “the Resurrection and the Life.”
But His life has no spiritual power over ours, unless it teaches us divine love--unless we live in that love which He came to unveil.
Christians have miserably failed of this--in their treatment of each other as well as of the Jews, but it is because they have not received the spirit of their Master.
I thank you sincerely for writing to me so freely, and I thank you for having written the poem enclosed, which bears the same message to me as a Christian, that it does to you as a Jew. I should like to know more of Emma Lazarus. Her early death was a loss to all lovers of true poetry.
The ecstacy of a sudden realization of religious truth sometimes overcame her in the summer mornings, and her heart uttered itself fervently in prayer, as will be seen in the following extracts from her diary.
