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MORRIS JOSEPH (1848–1930), a graduate of Jews’ College, served as minister in the North London Synagogue before his election as preacher to the Liverpool Old Hebrew Congregation in 1874. His first volume of sermons, published in 1893, contained selections from his preaching at the sabbath afternoon service at the Hampstead Synagogue between 1890 and 1892. One of these sermons, on ‘The Sacrificial Rite’, repudiates the hope for the restoration of the sacrificial cult, and this liberal stance led to his veto by the chief rabbi, Hermann Adler, when the synagogue elected him as their minister (despite this, he maintained a relationship of respect and friendship with Adler, to whom he paid a moving tribute at Adler's death). A second volume was published in 1907, and a third, containing the present sermon, was published in 1930. This contains sermons ‘preached chiefly at the West London Synagogue’, in which he succeeded David Woolf Marks as minister. Four of these sermons deal with the First World War as its devastation was unfolding.
A sermon delivered by Joseph in the early days of the Boer War (28 October 1899) was—unlike the patriotic endorsement of British imperial policy and military heroism by the chief rabbi (Sermon 14 above)—a sober reflection on the various costs of war:
We see that War means something more than a picturesque movement of troops, more than the thrilling gallantry of heroes, more than victory and the increase of national glory. It means the sacrifice of many a precious life; it means mourning and pain and misery for the victors, and for the vanquished this and humiliation too; it means the awakening of brutal passions, the resuscitation of ‘the ape and tiger’, that we would all willingly let die; it means the stirring of inter-racial hatred that may leave a legacy of enmity and strife to embitter the coming years. Nay, it means a serious arrest of the world in its march of progress. It means a sudden breaking with all mankind's best trad itions, a sudden defeat of all its noblest ideals. It means that the precious foothold won so hardly has been lost, and that, Sisyphus-like, civilisation must begin its painful task over again.
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