to prepare you, as Moses was prepared, to serve your people the better,
that depends on another order than the law which must guide our
footsteps. For the evil will of man makes not a people's good except by
stirring the righteous will of man; and beneath all the clouds with
which our thought encompasses the Eternal, this is clear--that a people
can be blessed only by having counsellors and a multitude whose will
moves in obedience to the laws of justice and love. For see, now, it
was your loving will that made a chief pathway, and resisted the effect
of evil; for, by performing the duties of brotherhood to my sister, and
seeking out her brother in the flesh, your soul has been prepared to
receive with gladness this message of the Eternal, 'behold the
multitude of your brethren.'"

"It is quite true that you and Mirah have been my teachers," said
Deronda. "If this revelation had been made to me before I knew you
both, I think my mind would have rebelled against it. Perhaps I should
have felt then--'If I could have chosen, I would not have been a Jew.'
What I feel now is--that my whole being is a consent to the fact. But
it has been the gradual accord between your mind and mine which has
brought about that full consent."

At the moment Deronda was speaking, that first evening in the book-shop
was vividly in his remembrance, with all the struggling aloofness he
had then felt from Mordecai's prophetic confidence. It was his nature
to delight in satisfying to the utmost the eagerly-expectant soul,
which seemed to be looking out from the face before him, like the
long-enduring watcher who at last sees the mountain signal-flame; and
he went on with fuller fervor--

"It is through your inspiration that I have discerned what may be my
life's task. It is you who have given shape to what, I believe, was an
inherited yearning--the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in many
ancestors--thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my
grandfather. Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe
brought up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for
painting, and born blind--the ancestral life would lie within them as a
dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound
habit of their inherited frames would be like a cunningly-wrought
musical instrument, never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy
mysterious meanings of its intricate structure that, under the right
touch, gi