"You cannot have thought of them without prejudice, then," he answered,
"if you say we have no ideals."

"I mean, we're not responsive to great poetry--to the message of a
Browning for instance."

"I deny it. Only a small percentage of his own race is responsive. I
would wager our percentage is proportionally higher. But Browning's
philosophy of religion is already ours, for hundreds of years every
Saturday night every Jew has been proclaiming the view of life and
Providence in 'Pisgah Sights.'"

All's lend and borrow,
Good, see, wants evil,
Joy demands sorrow,
Angel weds devil.

"What is this but the philosophy of our formula for ushering out the
Sabbath and welcoming in the days of toil, accepting the holy and the
profane, the light and the darkness?"

"Is that in the prayer-book?" said Esther astonished.

"Yes; you see you are ignorant of our own ritual while admiring
everything non-Jewish. Excuse me if I am frank, Miss Ansell, but there
are many people among us who rave over Italian antiquities but can see
nothing poetical in Judaism. They listen eagerly to Dante but despise
David."

"I shall certainly look up the liturgy," said Esther. "But that will not
alter my opinion. The Jew may say these fine things, but they are only a
tune to him. Yes, I begin to recall the passage in Hebrew--I see my
father making _Havdolah_--the melody goes in my head like a sing-song.
But I never in my life thought of the meaning. As a little girl I always
got my conscious religious inspiration out of the New Testament. It
sounds very shocking, I know."

"Undoubtedly you put your finger on an evil. But there is religious
edification in common prayers and ceremonies even when divorced from
meaning. Remember the Latin prayers of the Catholic poor. Jews may be
below Judaism, but are not all men below their creed? If the race which
gave the world the Bible knows it least--" He stopped suddenly, for
Addie was playing pianissimo, and although she was his sister, he did
not like to put her out.

"It comes to this," said Esther when Chopin spoke louder, "our
prayer-book needs depolarization, as Wendell Holmes says of the Bible."

"Exactly," assented Raphael. "And what our people need is to make
acquaintance with the treasure of our own literature. Why go to Browning
for theism, when the words of his 'Rabbi Ben Ezra' are but a synopsis of
a famous Jewish argument:

"'I see the whole design.
I, who sa