Scrolls (Volume 2); Essays on Jewish History and Literature, and Kindred Subjects (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1917 Excerpt: ... THE YEAR 5673--A RESUME. THE review of last year published in these columns, began with a quotation from St. Augustine. It is just a mere accident, that this year's review will begin with a quotation from Martin Luther, Augustine's most consistent disciple. That fatalism of Augustine, seeing in immorality a mere disease, in Luther, as is often the case, was coupled with an exactly opposite idea. He was the advocate of rebellion against authority. "Councils may err, and councils have erred," he said in his famous address before the Reichstag, April 18, 1521. This conviction that a view is not true, though at one time it was generally held, is more strongly presented by Goethe, "The Great Heathen," who said: "Es erben sich Gesetz' und Rechte wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort." This great genius, like Luther, shows his limitation. Luther, the rebel against authority, approved of the burning of Servetus, who only consistently carried out Luther's principles, when he denied Trinity. Goethe, who speaks of law as an inherited disease, which is different from that only true law which is born with us, is happy, when he hears that the new ruler of his native city retained in the new legislation many of the disabilities of the Jews.1 The American Israelite, October 2-9, 1913. 1Mitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Bekaempfung des Antisemitismus, 1899, p. 258. Ludwig Geiger: Goethe, Bettina und die Frankfurter Juden in: Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, 1903,0.474-477. Germany is entering into an era of centenaries. Breslau has already celebrated the liberation from the yoke of the Corsican despot. Bavaria gave a great state's affair in the hall erected in memory of the fiftieth anniversary of the event, and we may suppose that the anniversary of the battle of Leipsic will be ce...