horough receptiveness toward direction have been ridiculed? Only by
those who hold it a sign of weakness to be obliged for an idea, and
prefer to hint that they have implicitly held in a more correct form
whatever others have stated with a sadly short-coming explicitness.
After all, what was there but vulgarity in taking the fact that
Mordecai was a poor Jewish workman, and that he was to be met perhaps
on a sanded floor in the parlor of the _Hand and Banner_ as a reason
for determining beforehand that there was not some spiritual force
within him that might have a determining effect on a white-handed
gentleman? There is a legend told of the Emperor Domitian, that having
heard of a Jewish family, of the house of David, whence the ruler of
the world was to spring, he sent for its members in alarm, but quickly
released them on observing that they had the hands of
work-people--being of just the opposite opinion with that Rabbi who
stood waiting at the gate of Rome in confidence that the Messiah would
be found among the destitute who entered there. Both Emperor and Rabbi
were wrong in their trust of outward signs: poverty and poor clothes
are no sign of inspiration, said Deronda to his inward objector, but
they have gone with it in some remarkable cases. And to regard
discipleship as out of the question because of them, would be mere
dullness of imagination.

A more plausible reason for putting discipleship out of the question
was the strain of visionary excitement in Mordecai, which turned his
wishes into overmastering impressions, and made him read outward facts
as fulfillment. Was such a temper of mind likely to accompany that wise
estimate of consequences which is the only safeguard from fatal error,
even to ennobling motive? But it remained to be seen whether that rare
conjunction existed or not in Mordecai: perhaps his might be one of the
natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of
that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes
in. The inspirations of the world have come in that way too: even
strictly-measuring science could hardly have got on without that
forecasting ardor which feels the agitations of discovery beforehand,
and has a faith in its preconception that surmounts many failures of
experiment. And in relation to human motives and actions, passionate
belief has a fuller efficacy. Here enthusiasm may have the validity of
proof, and happening in one soul, give t