That these are Zangwill's own hopes and philosophy there is little room for doubt. Yet Strelitzki is in no sense a portrait. He lacks the humor of the novelist, and it is not easy to believe that his spiritual history is the same. The manysided picture which this writer has given of Jewish life suggests a shifting point of view, and gives the impression that he has sometime felt that same repulsion for Judaism which impelled Ester to write Mordecai Jacobs. Perhaps he has felt, as well as seen, the tyranny of a literal interpretation of the law. He is held, too, no doubt, by that irresistible affinity for the traditions of his race which kept Hannah Jacobs from joining her lover on Seder night. Certainly he has illustrated, again and again, what one of his characters has called the centrifugal and centripetal force of Judaism, that sometimes repels and sometimes attracts her sons and daughters, but never allows them to remain neutral. Zangwill's attitude toward the Jewish ceremonial is interesting. He is never blind to its incongruities, to the hollowness of its formalism, or to its tendency to petrify. Yet he feels the emotional power of its ritual, all the poetry and picturesque beauty of its mysticism, as he says:

It was a wonderful liturgy, as grotesque as it was beautiful-like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side shows, and overgrown with moss and lichens-a heterogeneous blending of historic strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual fervor glittered, and pitiful records of ancient persecution lay petrified. . . . If the service had been more intelligible it would have been less emotional and edifying.

...

Despite his keen sense of the grotesque and absurd, he sees, perhaps as few have done, what a power for good ceremonial Judaism has been in fostering a sense of brotherhood and love of home and in keeping alive the Jewish ideals through ages of persecution. Hence his reverence for what to an outsider is merely hollow ceremony. He regards it all with something of the half-reverent, half-amused tenderness which one feels for the quaint furnishings of the old homestead that he loved in childhood.

With all his warm appreciation for the poetic and picturesque in the life and creed of his people, all his reverence for

the dignity and moral beauty of their history and religious ideals, Zangwill is thoroughly modern. He sees the necessity of absorbing the culture of the day, if Israel is to fulfill the prophecy that in it "shall all the nations of the earth be blest." He claims, moreover, that "there is more in Judaism akin to the modern spirit than there is in any other religion;" that the "Mosaic code aims at all that is best in socialism, without interfering with the free play of individual activity." The artistic sense which restrains him in the novel, helping him to present a true picture of his people, gives way somewhat in his magazine articles to his race enthusiasm. His claims for Judaism, past, present, and future, breathe something of that pride and passionate assertion found in Shylock's plea for humanity. The very strength of his faith in Judaism renders him unjust to Christianity. But of this we have no right to complain until we are sure that we have been just to Judaism. We need not, however, be misled by his statements. His attempts to contrast the tendencies of Christianity and Hebrewism, in his article in the North American Review, are far less discriminating and satisfactory than most of his work. The faults he mentions such as the divorce of religion and secular life, the crude conception that makes Christianity a religion of death and pessimism-have been deprecated by our greatest Christian teachers, and are no more inherent in the Christian than in the Jewish creed. If Zangwill pictures Judaism faithfully there is little significance in the phrase, "Judaism aims at influencing character through conduct, Christianity at influencing conduct through emotion." Indeed, few Christians emphasize the value and power of emotion in the religious life as Zangwill has done in The Children of the Ghetto. But some of his thoughts are full of inspiring suggestion for the thinking soul of both Jew and Christian, in these days of religious unrest:

Sociology will never gain a footing in the modern world until it is touched with emotion, so that obedience is rendered, not to cold hygienic laws, but to warm religious feeling.... Religions are not true in the sense in which scientific facts are true. They live by what is true in the appeal of their ideals, and by the organization which they provide to link the generations. ... When we think how the earliest of theistic 59-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XIII.

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creeds, this original Catholic, democratic Church of humanity, has persisted through the ages, . . . when we remember how he has agonized— the great misunderstood of history—and how, despite all and after all, he is living to see the world turning slowly back to the vision of life, then one seems to see "the finger of God," the hand of the Master-artist, behind the comedy-tragedy of existence.

After all, the most inspiring thing about Zangwill is his belief in the power of an ideal, in the ennobling influence which the sacrifice of material and selfish interests for the sake of our ideals exerts upon the soul. This he believes to be the great and sufficient reward for keeping the Sabbath and placing religion before worldly advantage.

It would be scarcely possible or fair to attempt a parallel between a tragic specimen of a hunted race, which has at last turned in self-defense, and the free aspiring idealists of the nineteenth century. Yet they stand before us with the same intensity of feeling. Shylock, his race characteristics as conspicuous as his Jewish gabardine, is a striking example of the hardening, maddening process of the tragedy of Judaism in the dark ages of its history. Emma Lazarus belongs to that period of transition when renewed persecution was needed to arouse the racial pride and instinct and to arrest the threatened dissolution of the nation. Zangwill represents the Judaism that has rediscovered its ideals and is determined to fulfill its mission to the whole world. In all three there is the zeal, the imagination, the tenacity of purpose, the warmth and glow of a people famed in history for the depth and fervor of their sensibilities, a race that has been called "the heart of the world."

Ellen A. Viitor

ART. V.-OUR DISJOINTED EPISCOPACY.

THE rights, duties, powers, and privileges of a Methodist general superintendent are clearly defined in the book of Discipline. The organic law guards and guarantees the status and some of the prerogatives of a bishop, while the statutes make his functions plain. He is a very high officer, clothed with inalienable rights and protected by all the authority of fundamental ecclesiastical sanctions. He cannot be done away. It were as easy to destroy the Church as to destroy him. He is established in the constitution, and the constitution is antecedent to government. The constitution is the supreme law.

Attempts have been made to show that missionary bishops are equal in rank, permanency, and authority to general superintendents. It were as easy to prove them superior as to prove them equal. There they stand, two grades of bishops, historically, constitutionally, legally, theoretically, and practically different. It is true that a missionary bishop has a status fixed by the constitution, but so he has a limitation fixed by the same document. The constitution nowhere prescribes that the missionary episcopacy shall not be done away, nor that the plan of it shall be kept inviolate, nor that it shall have a share in the presidency of the lawmaking body or a voice in the calling of an extra session. So distinct are the limitations of authority, the methods of administration, and the sources of support betwixt the regular and the missionary episcopacy that those of the latter are formulated and published in a separate disciplinary chapter. In this chapter it is specifically declared that a missionary bishop is not, in the meaning of the Discipline, a general superintendent, cannot be made such except by distinct election, and that, while not subordinate to the general superintendents, he is not coordinate with them. in authority save in the field to which he is appointed. He is de facto a separate officer consecrated by a specific formula, receives support from a different treasury, and is subject to the decisions of the general superintendents in all differences of judgment which may arise betwixt himself and the bishop

having coordinate authority with him under the quadrennial appointment.

The purpose of this article is to show that these two grades in our Methodist episcopacy are unnecessary and embarrassing. We have no alarming facts to cite, no aggravating official acts to bring into condemnation, no disloyal or unholy schemes to expose; our desire is simply and solely to point out certain unhappy tendencies, and to indicate how our noble Church polity can be somewhat simplified, our episcopal administration better harmonized and solidified, and some of our most prominent and promising Church interests brought into more intimate and helpful relation to our general economy.

Like some other anomalous things, the missionary episcopacy had its origin in slavery times. It was instituted to serve a purpose in the fatherland of slaves and to accommodate the important demands of an aggressive Church to the whims and prejudices of proslavery leaders. Ever since this office was opened to white incumbents its course has been marked by agitation, controversy, and more or less of heart-burning and rivalry. Few questions have given rise to so much misapprehension, discussion, and recent legislation. All this might have been averted by slight modifications of the rules governing the general superintendency, or possibly by modification of their practice alone. No missionary bishop has been more constantly in his field, nor more efficient in his labors, nor more instructive and inspiring in his official reports than the same individual might have been as a general superintendent, appointed year by year continuously as the demands of his field might have required. Our missionary bishops have made their tours of inspection, their rounds of visitation, and their returns to the home land in very much the same manner as have the regular bishops. Their episcopal work has been that of superintendency pure and simple, and as "general," too, as the limitations of their office have permitted. Meantime the general superintendents have practically been excluded from these specially superintended fields; and the variety of observation, study, and conclusion which might have attended the same work by general superintendents has been denied to the Church. For ten years the prestige of our general superin