By the late DR. HANDLEY MOULE.
The following extract is taken from Dr. Handley Moule’s “Commentary on Romans xi. 11”:—
“It is one of the most marked, as it is one of the saddest, phenomena in the history of the Church that for ages we look in vain either for any appreciable Jewish element in Christendom, or for any extended effort on the part of Christendom to win Jewish hearts to Christ by a wise and loving evangelisation. No doubt there is more than one side to the persistent phenomenon. There is a side of mystery; the sentence of the eternal has to do with long and sad affliction, however caused, of the people who once uttered the fatal cry, ‘His blood be on us, and on our children.’ (Matthew xxvii. 25.) And the wrong-doings of Jews, beyond a doubt, have often made a dark occasion for a ‘Jew-hatred,’ on a larger or narrower scale. But all this leaves unaltered, from the point of view of the Gospel, the sin of Christendom in its tremendous failure to seek, in love, the spiritual and Christian good of erring Israel. It leaves as black as ever the guilt of every fierce retaliation upon Jews by so-called ‘Christians,’ of every slanderous belief about Jewish life, of every unjust anti-Jewish law ever passed by ‘Christian’ king or senate. It leaves an undiminished responsibility upon the Church of Christ for the wrong of having failed to manifest Christ to Israel through the living holiness of Christendom. May the mercy of God awaken Gentile Christendom, in a manner and degree as yet unknown, to remember this our indefeasible debt to this people everywhere present with us, everywhere distinct from us—the debt of a life, personal and ecclesiastical, so manifestly pure and loving in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as to ‘move them to jealousy’ which shall claim Him again for their own. Then we shall indeed be hastening the day of full and final blessing, both for themselves and for the world.”