n deliverance and the miracle of the unwaning oil in the
Temple, and to Purim with its masquerading and its execration of Haman's
name by the banging of little hammers; and so back to Passover. And with
these larger cycles, epicycles of minor fasts and feasts, multiplex, not
to be overlooked, from the fast of the ninth of Ab--fatal day for the
race--when they sat on the ground in shrouds, and wailed for the
destruction of Jerusalem, to the feast of the Great Hosannah when they
whipped away willow-leaves on the _Shool_ benches in symbolism of
forgiven sins, sitting up the whole of the night before in a long
paroxysm of prayer mitigated by coffee and cakes; from the period in
which nuts were prohibited to the period in which marriages were
commended.

And each day, too, had its cycles of religious duty, its comprehensive
and cumbrous ritual with accretions of commentary and tradition.

And every contingency of the individual life was equally provided for,
and the writings that regulated all this complex ritual are a marvellous
monument of the patience, piety and juristic genius of the race--and of
the persecution which threw it back upon its sole treasure, the Law.

Thus they lived and died, these Sons of the Covenant, half-automata,
sternly disciplined by voluntary and involuntary privation, hemmed and
mewed in by iron walls of form and poverty, joyfully ground under the
perpetual rotary wheel of ritualism, good-humored withal and casuistic
like all people whose religion stands much upon ceremony; inasmuch as a
ritual law comes to count one equally with a moral, and a man is not
half bad who does three-fourths of his duty.

And so the stuffy room with its guttering candles and its
Chameleon-colored ark-curtain was the pivot of their barren lives. Joy
came to bear to it the offering of its thanksgiving and to vow sixpenny
bits to the Lord, prosperity came in a high hat to chaffer for the holy
privileges, and grief came with rent garments to lament the beloved dead
and glorify the name of the Eternal.

The poorest life is to itself the universe and all that therein is, and
these humble products of a great and terrible past, strange fruits of a
motley-flowering secular tree whose roots are in Canaan and whose boughs
overshadow the earth, were all the happier for not knowing that the
fulness of life was not theirs.

And the years went rolling on, and the children grew up and here and
there a parent.

* *