the earth.'* Moreover, it was not an unwonted or un-
known thing for men of alien race to link themselves
unto the faith of Israel. Proselytism had already begun,
well within the Psalmic period. Sons of the foreigner
had arrived, who had joined themselves unto the Lord
to love His name and be His servants; and these new-
comers, gathered thus unto Israel and Israel's God, had
made a late prophet, contemporary of many a psalmist,
dream of a noble future in which the Lord's house should
be called a house of prayer for all peoples. These
proselytes were known as 'they who feared the Lord'
(literally, 'the fearers of Yahweh'). They are alluded
to in the Psalter as constituting a distinct class. Them,
too, God will bless; they, too, are bidden to praise Him.
'O Israel, trust in the Lord;

He is their help and their shield.
O House of Aaron, trust in the Lord;
He is their help and their shield.

Ye that fear the Lord, trust in the Lord;
He is their help and their shield.

The Lord has been mindful of us; He will bless,

He will bless the house of Israel,

He will bless the house of Aaron;

He will bless them that fear the Lord,
Both small and great!'

And, again:

'Let Israel now say,

That His loving-kindness lasts for ever!

Let the house of Aaron now say,

That His loving-kindness lasts for ever!

Let them that fear the Lord now say,

That His loving-kindness lasts for ever!'

In truth the foreign settlers' whom the Pentateuchal
Law, with such exquisite and peculiar emphasis, had
bidden the Israelites cherish and love, were now turning
into proselytes, so that the Hebrew term for them, the
Gerim, was rendered by the Greek translators #poonλToι,
and in Rabbinic Hebrew meant no less. When a late
Psalmist declares that the Lord guards the Gerim, it is
quite possible that the writer is thinking of them as

McFadyen: The Messages of the Psalmists,' p. 283.

6

adherents to Israel's faith. It is thus, at any rate, that
the Midrash understands the utterance.

The Holy One loves the Gerim exceedingly. To what is the
matter like? To a King who had a flock of sheep and goats
which went forth every morning to the pasture, and returned
in the evening to the stable. One day a stag joined the
flock, and grazed with the sheep, and returned with them.
Then the shepherd said to the King: There is a stag which
goes out with the sheep, and grazes with them, and comes
home with them. And the King loved the stag exceedingly.
And he commanded the shepherd, saying: Give heed unto
this stag, that no man beat it. And when the sheep returned
in the evening, he would order that the stag should have
food and drink. Then the shepherds said unto him: My
Lord, thou hast many goats and sheep and kids; yet thou
givest us no directions about them; but about this stag thou
givest us orders day by day. Then the King replied: It is
the custom of the sheep to graze in the pasture, but the stags
dwell in the steppe, and it is not their custom to come among
men in the cultivated land. So to this stag who has come to
us, and lives with us, should we not be grateful, that he has
left the great steppe, where many stags and gazelles feed, and
has come to live among us? It behoves us to be grateful.
So, too, spake the Holy One: I owe great thanks to the Ger,
in that he has left his family and his father's house, and has
come to dwell amongst us. Therefore I order in the Law:
Love ye the Ger.'

Great as was the love of the psalmists for Jerusalem,
it was something loftier than a mere national love. It
was more to them than the mere capital of their nation.
The city was loved because it included the hill of Zion,
because it contained the Temple, because it was the
house and innermost centre of Israel's religion. It was
the place (in Prof. Jordan's words) of God's special
presence in the world and the centre of the world's
spiritual life.'*

'Great is Yahweh, and highly to be praised,

In the city of our God, in His holy mountain,
Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth,
Is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north,

The city of the Great King.'

We have to admit that the psalmists, like all their

contemporaries, never freed their religion completely

from national influences and local limitations.' Yet

' even at this distance of time our hearts are moved by

the enthusiastic reverence of the patriot for the ancient

city of God.' And one psalmist at least there was for

whom Zion was especially holy and blessed, because she

should be, in a still wider sense, a spiritual metropolis,

because the widespread votaries of the One and only

God would regard Jerusalem as their true religious

home.

'Glorious things are spoken of thee,

Zion, the city of God.

Rahab and Babel I mention among those that know me,
Philistia, likewise, and Tyre, with Cush;

But Zion-she shall be called Mother,

For each and all were born in her.'†

Not physically born there, not resident there, not even
of Israel's race, they yet recognise Zion as their spiritual
mother, whom they invoke and whom they honour. So
with us, too, if we are touched with the breath of
modernism, whether we call ourselves Christians or
Jews, when we remember Jerusalem, it is, in Prof.
Jordan's excellently chosen words,

'for sorrows endured and services rendered, not as a monopoly
or central shrine. It is because the songs of Zion have gone
out into the world, and through the centuries gain ever
larger meaning, that we turn our eyes, not to the East or
the West, but upward to that city of God which is the new
Jerusalem and the mother of us all.'

195.

* Religion in Song,' pp. 80, 81.

† Prof. Gordon's translation in The Poets of the Old Testament,' p.

'Religion in Song,' p. 121.

C. G. MONTEFIORE.

of

Art. 2.-AN ENGLISH PRISON FROM WITHIN. THE aim of this article is to give the reader a record of the writer's impressions of our prison system, and, in particular, of its moral and mental effect upon convicted prisoners. It is based upon some twelve months' experience of prison life, of which four months were spent in a large London prison, and nearly eight months in a smaller county gaol.* My offence happened to be that of disobedience' to military orders on the ground of conscientious objection to all war; but I do not wish to lay any stress on the nature of the offence, or on the justice of the two successive sentences imposed, except in so far as these considerations gave us a different outlook from the ordinary 'criminals' occupying the adjoining cells. We objectors to conscription were not conscious any guilt involved in the act for which we were committed to gaol; on the contrary, we were, more or less powerfully, sustained in our endurance by a faith in the righteousness, and, in many cases, in the supremely Christian character of the cause for which we conceived ourselves to be suffering loss of liberty and a measure of persecution. Rightly or wrongly, this was our conviction, and it reacted, of course, upon our impressions of prison, and differentiated them in some important respects from those of a hardened or a penitent 'offender.' But the main tendencies of the system, its general effects on character and mentality, seemed to me to be sufficiently clear, and to be of a similar nature for all prisoners involved. Almost all conscientious objectors courtmartialled have received sentences of hard labour' (which may be repeated indefinitely) varying from 112 days to two years; and, until the last week of my imprisonment, we were treated, with a few unimportant exceptions, in the same way as other prisoners undergoing

* In addition, I had two periods of some five weeks each in a regimental detention room. The conditions here were far preferable to prison. The only way in which they concern the subject of this article is that we had opportunities of talking freely to men who had done time' for burglary and other offences. Their conversation and bearing helped us to look at prisons from the point of view of the class of offender for whom they are primarily intended.

I was discharged in December 1917, as the result of the Government's undertaking to release men suffering materially in health.

hard labour in the third division. At the end of 1917, a few privileges were accorded to objectors who had been at least twelve months under sentence; of these the only ones of value are the permission to have books sent in from the outside, and the provision daily of two periods of exercise, at which talking in pairs is allowed.

Each generation of mankind is only too apt to imagine that the particular social conditions under which it happens to live have persisted with but small changes from remote antiquity; and it is well to emphasise the essentially modern and novel character of the prison system, as it exists to-day, with but slight variations, throughout the British Isles. This system seems to have been inaugurated during the second half of the 18th century in one or two local experiments that came to nothing, and to have been given a partial trial at the famous Millbank Penitentiary opened in 1816, but only to have been really developed in the forties of the last century, when the principle of entire separation was adopted by the Government as the result of a Commission of enquiry into the methods of American penitentiaries. During the period 1840-60 some sixty new 'cellular' prisons were built, beginning with the 'model' institution at Pentonville as we have it to-day. Only from 1877, when the Prison Act placed all gaols under the newly-formed board of Prison Commissioners, has the present uniformity of discipline held sway. Before the opening of Millbank, with its 1000, and Pentonville, with its 520 separate cells, indiscriminate herding together of offenders was the general rule. Practically, therefore, the present régime of silence and solitude is less than eighty years old. Have its results in any way justified even this term of existence?

It may be premised that the usual hard-labour sentence begins with a month of strict confinement to one's cell (apart from exercise and chapel), accompanied by a fortnight's plank bed and other disabilities, while, after the first month, good conduct secures one the privilege of 'associated' but silent labour during part of the day.

The characteristics of the system, as impressed upon me by many dreary weeks of experience, seemed to group themselves around three main heads, which I propose to illustrate successively: firstly, discomfort for the body