The Express.
London, England, 1852-01-23 00:00:00

MR. DISRAELI AND HIS VIEWS.

Lord Boar Banana& : a Political Biography. By
BINJAMIS DISE/A/LI. M.P.
[ficeee-d Notice.]
- . _ _

It is a very dangerous step for a politician to be-
come theologian; yet it is one into which, in spite of
the warning held out hy Mr. Gladstone's example
and his own diversified experience, Mr. Disraeli has
been betrayed by the impulse of strong feeling and
an irrepressible sympathy for his race. Mr. Glad-
stone propounded to the world an elaborate theory of
church principles, which vastly delighted Anglicans
sad made him the hope of their party ; but the
course of events soon punished Ins transgression
against the law of politics, and Sir Robert
Peel's government had to deplore the loss
of a cabinet minister, who had ventured
to write a book for the purpose of enlightening the
theological opinions of his country. Before many
months are over, Mr. Disraeli may have become a
cabinet minister also. It is a striking proof of his
sanguine temper, and of the overwhelming strength
of the bond which unites the members of the Jewish
race to each other, that a man occupying so prominent
a position, with so many peculiarities to render his
career difficult and hazardous, should have travelled
out of his way, without the smallest pressure of
necessity, to insert a theological disquisition in a
political biography, and that, too, on a subject sin-
gularly distasteful to the great and fastidious party
of which the strange accidents of political life hair
made him the leader in the House of Commons.

The religious views of those who hold the highest
offices in the government must ever be mutter of the
deepest interest to a nation whose civil consti-
tution contains ecclesiastical elements so numerous
and so vitally important as that of Eng-
land. The religious earnestness which charac-
terises our age, makes the country doubly alive to
the theological opinions and tendencies of its leading
statesmen : the more especially as many of the ques-
tions which most agitate the public mind and deter-
mine the course of our national legislation relate to
our ecclesiastical institutions, and arc invested with
surpassing interest by the strength of the religious
convictions of the people, and their incessant efforts
to influence in one shape or other the public litb of
the nation.

Mr. Disraeli had written much, but not directly on
religion. In his "Political Biography " of Lord
George Bentinck he supplies the omission by a long
and elaborate argument in favour of the Jews, in
which he strives not only to secure for them that
equality of civil rights to which the House of Com-
mons has repeatedly declared them to be entitled,
but also to vindicate for them, on religious and histo-
rical grounds, the highest pre-eminence among the
races of mankind. Ile not only paints the Jews as
the victims of a cruel and unjust persecution, but in
his anxiety to dispel the feelings which have
prompted the infliction of these wrongs, he arrogates
for them by reasonings of a most q lest ionable character,
a greatness nod a merit which arc as unfounded as
they are offensive.
It is greatly to bo regretted, for Mr. Disraeli's
own sake, but much more for the sake of the great
cause of his people, that he did not restrict his efforts
to the establishment of those claims whose justice
and reasonableness commend themselves with ever-
increasing effect to the general sense of the country,
and did not forbear from urging demands on Gentile
reverence and gratitude equally novel and unsus-
tainable. No pleading for his countrymen could be
more injudicious than the advancing of new specu-
lations on religion in direct opposition to Christian
opinions and Christian feelings.
Mr. Disraeli marvels at the logic " which does not
look upon the Jews as the human family that has
contributed most to human happiness:" and then to
account for the paradox of the greatest benefactors
of mankind being subjected to the greatest persecu-
tion, invents a theory about the feeling of Christians
towards the Jews which a Sunday-school girl would
know how to answer, but which he is at the pains
of refuting with the most pompous ostentation.
The dispersion of the Jews was a penalty inflicted
for tne crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans, and
at the instigation of some Jews. Such a picture
misrepresents the Christian view, and ignores the
great guilt of the Jewish nation. The crucifixion
was but the culminating point of a series of crimes
unparalleled in history. No other people has offended
so deeply as the Jews, because no other people has
received such signal favours. To them alone was
revelation given : they alone were ruled directly
by God himself. And what does their history
record? Little less than an unbroken succession of
the moat ungrateful and the most impious rebellions
against Him who was their King and their God.
What was polytheism in Greek or Roman, compared
with idolatry in a Jew? They possessed no divine
oracle: the knowledge of the true God had not been
communicated to them. Shall a nation whose annals
record an uninterrupted stream of treason and apes-
tacy, not of some, but of the whole people, bo held up
to the pm-eminent admiration of mankind?
A very slender examination of the authentic docu-
ments of Jewish history would have saved Mr.
Disraeli from the egregious discovery, that Christians
connected the dispersion of the Jews with the
crime of the crucifixion alone. Ho would have
been spared the superfluous pain of proving what
Christians learn as children, that the Jews were all
along a stiff-necked and rebellious people—that their
own prophets repeatedly announced their dispersion
over the world, and that the sentence was carried
out by the appointed ministers of divine vengeance
many ages before the Messiah appeared. Mr.
Disraeli's idle demonstration that the Jews were
scattered into strange. lands before the consumma-
tion of their highest crime only establishes the anti-
quity and continued duration of the national guilt.
No nation was so signally punished, because no other
nation was so transcendently guilty.
Mr. Disraeli ventures to tread on still more sacred
ground, to which we almost tremble to follow him.
Having refuted as historically false the notion that
the Jews were dispersed abroad on account of the
crucifixion, he next assails it as dug atieally un-
sound. "The immolators were pre ordained like the
victim, and the holy race supplied both. Could that
be a crime which secured for all mankind eternal
joy ? which vanquished Satan, and opened the gates
of Paradise?" What is this but to wipe away guilt
with the good effects which the benevolence of Pro-
vidence may make to flow from it ? To destroy the
essential character of good and evil, and to appeal to
consequences instead of the feelings and purpose of
the heart, for determining the moral. quality of
human conduct ? Nay more, what else is it but to
fall into the deep abyss of fatalism, and to find in
the preknowledge of the Deity the justification of
every crime? Does Mr. Disraeli mean to as-
sert that God compelled the Jews to crucify
Christ P If he recoils with horror, as he
must do, from such a blasphemy, will he pre-
tend that the guilt of the Jews was one iota
the less, because God allowed them to work their
wicked will on an innocent Being, and opened in
their crime a fountain of eternal blessing for the
human race? Will he vaunt the beneficial results of
their sin, thus overruled to good by a Higher Power,
as grounds for commanding the gratitude of men?
It will not be surprising, if, after having subverted
the distinctions of morality, Mr. Disraeli should be
discovered to confound those also of religion. A
"converted Jew" is ridiculed as an absurd phrase-
ology, and the Lombards are taunted with confusion
of ideas for forgetting that it is they who are the
converts. Either Mr. Disraeli has studied little the
difference between the Jewish and Christian religions,
or he has wilfully committed a very reprehensible
equivoque. The Christians arc converts to the Jew-
ish religion, if by that expression is meant the reli-
gion which the Jewish scriptures point to and
proclaim —the Jewish religion in its full com-
pletion and development. But if the phrase
refers to the religion professed by the unbe-
lieving Jews, then it ia not only not identical,
but the direct opposite of the Christian religion. It
is the Jews who are traitors to the Jewish religion,
and who, by rejecting the central point of the whole
revelation, that to which every other part converged,
and which gave significance to the whole, have re-
nounced the true Jewish religion. It is an act of dis-
ingenuous sophistry to attempt to cover the apostacy
of the Jews under the shelter of an ambiguous
phrase.
Our complaints against Mr. Disraeli are not
merely theological. His zeal to exalt the Jews has
made him utter strange nonsense about the great-
ness of races which have resisted being absorbed by
populations amongst which they were dispersed.
Under such a theory he forgets that he must claim
for the Gipsies parity of honour with the Jews. The
absurdity would, however. be harmless and ridica-

lous but for its application. " The natural equality
of man, were it possible to act upon it, would
deteriorate the great races and destroy all the genius
of the world. What would be the consequence on
secede
Anglo-Saxon republic, were its citizens to
from their sound principle of reserve, and
mingle with their negro and coloured populations?"
That consequence, lie prophecies would be, the dete-
rioration of the Anglo-American, and the re-conquest
of America by her aborigines. History tells us that
the British are a mongrel and amalgamated people;
but it does not say that they are inferior in all
great qualities to the Norman, or Saxon, or other
races of which they are composed.
But what is Mr. Disratli's logic ? Is it the negro
who is the parallel of the Jew, and is it to preserve
his genius that the Anglo-Saxon is exhorted not to
commingle his " pure blood" with that which flows
in sable veins? Or is it the Anglo-Saxon who is
the analogy to the Jew, and who is implored by this
example of the Jew to keep his blood and genius
uncorrupted? If so, we must leave it to the supe-
rior skill end talent of Mr. Disraeli to reconcile his
protest against the persecution of the Jews in
Europe with his advocacy of the proscription of the
men of colour in America? We see no other expla-
nation than the ordinary one of all oppressors. It
is wrong to persecute the Jews, because they are a
superior race; but right to keep down the negroes,
because they are inferior. UnfOrtunately for cinch
maxims, each party who has the upper hand applies
the epithets at its pleasure; and they are nude to
justify all oppression.
Such inconsistencies—and it would be easy to pro-
duce many more—betray the shallowness which dis-
tinguishes the whole of this unhappy chapter. But
we confess, a feeling of shame crept over us when
we saw a leading English statesman covering with
the sanction of his authority the great crime, and,
by the law of nature, the great danger of the west-
ern world. Mr. Disraeli's name has sometimes been
whispered in connexion with the future administra-
tion of the foreign relations of England. Will the
people of this free country endure that their foreign
secretary should countenance the oppression of lice
coloured races by the Anglo-Americans, under the
soft name of a sound reserve? We arc mistaken
if the utterance of such sentiments helps Mr. Disraeli
to the Foreign-office.