What Phinehas Elijah (Hurwitz) of Vilna had
sown in tears, he lived to reap in joy.
There was a crying need in Russia for a work of the sort. In Germany the
very Government encouraged organizations and publications aiming at
enlightenment. Accordingly, a Society for the Promotion of the Good and
the Noble was started, and the Meassef was published. In Russo-Poland
not even a Hebrew printing-press was permitted, and certainly no
periodical publications would have been tolerated. Phinehas Elijah,
therefore, grasped the opportunity, and showed himself equal to it. His
aim was, like that of the French encyclopedists, to lead his readers
"through nature to God." He gives an account of the various sciences,
natural and philosophical, as a prolegomenon to the study of theology,
even of the mystic teachings of Vital's _Gates of Holiness_. Withal he
evinces a sound intellect and refined, if rudimentary, taste. He decries
the "ancestor worship" that rendered the Jew of his day a fossil
specimen of an extinct species. The present is superior to the past, "a
dwarf on a giant's shoulder seeth farther than doth the giant himself.
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