There is still a great function for the steadfastness of the Jew:  not that he should shut out the utmost illumination which knowledge can throw on his national history, but that he should cherish the store of inheritance which that history has left him.  Every Jew should be conscious that he is one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortal achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to them a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their fathers.

    There is a sense which the worthy child of a nation that has brought
    forth industrious prophets, high and unique among the poets of the
    world, is bound by their visions.

    Is bound?

Yes; for the effective bond of human action is feeling, and the worthy child of a people owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite and Jew, feels his kinship with the glories and the sorrows, the degradation and the possible renovation of his national family.

Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call his doctrine a philosophy?  He will teach a blinding superstition—­the superstition that a theory of human well-being can be constructed in disregard of the influences which have made us human.

The purpose of Daniel Deronda, however, is not merely to vindicate Judaism.  This race and its religion are used as the vehicles for larger ideas, as an illustration of the supreme importance to mankind of spiritual aims concentrated into the form of national traditions and aspirations.  Her own studies, and personal intercourse with the Jews, helped to attract her to this race; but the main cause of her use of them in this novel is their remarkable history.  Their moral and spiritual persistence, their wonderful devotedness to their own race and its aims, admirably adapted them to develop for her the ideas she wished to express.  What nation could she have taken that would have so clearly illustrated her theory of national memories and traditions?  In the forty-second chapter of Daniel Deronda she has put into the month of Mordecai her own theories on this subject.  He vindicates his right to call himself a rational Jew, one who accepts what is reasonable and true.

“It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a dependent growth—­yea, consecrate it with kinship; the past becomes my parent, and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of children.  Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that makes the families of man rich in interchanged wealth, and various as the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm?”

He declares that each nation has its own work to do in the world, in the uplifting and maintenance of some special idea which is necessary to the welfare and development of humanity.  The place he assigns to Judaism is precisely that which made it dear to George Eliot, because it embodied her conception of religion and its social functions.