“Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and the reverence for the human body which lifts the needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and weak and to the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us.”

Again, he utters words which are simply an expression of George Eliot’s own sentiments.

“Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made one growth—­where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual store at the very time when they were hunted with a hatred as fierce as the forest fires that chase the wild beast from his covert?  There is a fable of the Roman that, swimming to save his life, he held the roll of his writings between his teeth and saved them from the waters.  But how much more than that is true of our race?  They struggled to keep their place among the nations like heroes—­yea, when the hand was hacked off, they clung with the teeth; but when the plow and the harrow had passed over the last visible signs of their national covenant, and the fruitfulness of their land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and planters, they said, ’The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting habitation—­lasting because movable—­so that it may be carried from generation to generation, and our sons unborn may be rich in the things that have been, and possess a hope built on an unchangeable foundation.’  They said it and they wrought it, though often breathing with scant life, as in a coffin, or as lying wounded amid a heap of slain.  Hooted and scared like the unowned dog, the Hebrew made himself envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of them to fill the bath of Gentile luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it; his dispersed race was a new Phoenicia working the mines of Greece and carrying their products to the world.  The native spirit of our tradition was not to stand still, but to use records as a seed, and draw out the compressed virtues of law and prophecy.”

Then Mordecai unfolds his theory of national unity and of a regenerated national life; and it is impossible to read his words attentively without accepting them as an expression of George Eliot’s own personal convictions.  As an embodiment of her conception of the functions of national life they are full of interest aside from their place in the novel.

“In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the Divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead.  Revive the organic centre:  let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality.  Looking toward a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice