§ 33: If a people has been raised to this heroic obedience towards God, should it not be destined, should it not be able, above all others, to carry out divine intentions of a quite specific character? Let the soldier who offers blind obedience to his leader also be convinced of his leader’s sagacity, and say what this leader would not dare to undertake with him.
§ 34: Yet the Jewish people had venerated in their Jehovah the mightiest rather than the wisest of all Gods; yet they had feared Him as a Jealous God rather than loved Him: this, too, is a proof that the conceptions they had of their most supreme, One God were not exactly the right concepts we should have of God. But now the time had come for these concepts of theirs to be expanded, ennobled, and corrected, to which end God made use of a perfectly natural means, a better and more accurate criteria, by which the Jewish people now had occasion to assess him.
§ 35: Instead of assessing him, as hitherto, only in contrast to the miserable idols of the small, primitive neighboring tribes with whom they lived in constant rivalry, they began, in captivity under the wise Persian, to measure him against the being of all beings, as recognized and revered by a more proficient reason.
§ 36: Revelation had guided their reason; and now reason suddenly illuminated their revelation.
§ 37: This was the first reciprocal service that the two (reason and revelation) performed for each other; and such a reciprocal influence is so far from being unbecoming to the Author of them both that without it either of them would have been useless.
§ 38: The child, sent into foreign lands, saw other children who knew more and lived more becomingly, and asked itself, in shame, "Why do I not know that, too? Why do I not live in this way, too? Should I not have been taught this in my father’s house; should I not have been instructed to behave as such?" Then the child once again seeks out his primer, which had long since repulsed him, in order to cast the blame upon the primer. But lo and behold, he realizes that the blame does not lie in the books; that the blame for his not knowing this very thing already and living this very way already lies entirely with him.
§ 39: Now that the Jews, through the means of the purer Persian doctrine, recognized in their Jehovah not merely the greatest of all national deities but God; and now that they could more readily find him and point him out to others in their sacred writings, inasmuch as he was really in them; and now that they evinced – or were at least instructed in these sacred writings to evince – as great an aversion to sensuous representations as the Persians had always felt; what wonder is it that they found favor in the eyes of Cyrus, with divine worship which he surely recognized as being far inferior to pure Sabianism, and yet still far superior to the rude idolatries which, instead of the newer conception, had taken possession of the forsaken land of the Jews.
print version
return to list
previous document