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"The true Science of Judaism, the science which will last as long as time itself, is that which is founded on the faith; which endeavors to understand the Bible as a Divine work, and the history of a peculiar people whose lot has been peculiar; which, finally, dwells upon those moments in the various epochs of Jewish history when the innate genius of Judaism wages a conflict with the genius of humanity in general, as it lies in wait without, and how the Divine spirit of Judaism mastered the spirit of humanity throughout all the centuries.
The passions which agitate the masses that are brought into collision, the warlike qualities of these masses, the energy and talent of their commanders, the spirit, more or less martial, of nations and epochs, in a word, every thing that can be called the poetry and metaphysics of war, will have a permanent influence on its results.
To think that a man as shrewd, as subtle-minded, as quick-witted, and adroit as himself a man who had passed through so many troubled epochs, who had served with the same obsequious countenance all the masters who would accept his services to think that such a man should have been thus duped and betrayed!
All epochs are determined by economic arrangements. But a system of property always contains within itself "the seeds of its own destruction." Mechanical inventions suggest a change: a dispossessed class compels it. So mankind has progressed through savagery, chattel slavery, serfdom, to "wage slavery" or the capitalism of to-day. This age is pregnant with the socialism of to-morrow.
Dumouriez was of the number of men who are not to be painted by merely naming them, but of those whose previous life explains their nature; who have in the past the secret of their future; who have, like Mirabeau, their existence spread over two epochs; who have their roots in two soils, and are only known by the perusal of every detail.
Hence, it ought to be made known, by statistics, that the inhabitants of Lancashire, abandoning that land of machines, seek for work in Ireland, where they are unknown; and, by history, that barbarism darkens the epochs of civilisation, and that civilisation shines in times of ignorance and barbarism.
Similarly, we believe that there have been great epochs in human history, which cannot be accounted for by the previous evolution of moral and religious thought, and which must be due to the fact that God Himself stepped in, and by the direct raising up of a man, who became the apostle of the new era, lifted the race to new levels of thought and action.
Expressed in myths, these destructions and restorations are the Epochs of Nature. They are an essential part of the religious traditions of the Brahmans, Persians, Parsees, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Mexicans, Mayas, and of all nations who have reached a certain stage of culture. The length of the intervening periods may widely differ.
When he says that "a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws," we say that science teaches us that there must have been epochs in the history of the world when new forces made their appearance on the scene, for it teaches us that the world was once incandescent, and so incapable of supporting any conceivable form of animal life, but that at a certain geological period life made its appearance.
But, after all, we judge our generation mainly by its surface currents. There may be in progress a storage of beneficent forces which we cannot see. There are ages of sowing and ages of reaping: the brilliant epochs may be those in which spiritual wealth is squandered, the epochs of apparent decline may be those in which the race is recuperating after an exhausting effort.
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