nd mental type strong enough,
eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to
constitute a new beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by
confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to
their fathers.

There is a sense which the worthy child of a nation that has brought
forth industrious prophets, high and unique among the poets of the
world, is bound by their visions.

Is bound?

Yes; for the effective bond of human action is feeling, and the worthy
child of a people owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite and Jew,
feels his kinship with the glories and the sorrows, the degradation and
the possible renovation of his national family.

Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call his
doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding superstition--the
superstition that a theory of human well-being can be constructed in
disregard of the influences which have made us human.

The purpose of _Daniel Deronda_, however, is not merely to vindicate
Judaism. This race and its religion are used as the vehicles for larger
ideas, as an illustration of the supreme importance to mankind of spiritual
aims concentrated into the form of national traditions and aspirations. Her
own studies, and personal intercourse with the Jews, helped to attract her
to this race; but the main cause of her use of them in this novel is their
remarkable history. Their moral and spiritual persistence, their wonderful
devotedness to their own race and its aims, admirably adapted them to
develop for her the ideas she wished to express. What nation could she have
taken that would have so clearly illustrated her theory of national
memories and traditions? In the forty-second chapter of _Daniel Deronda_
she has put into the month of Mordecai her own theories on this subject. He
vindicates his right to call himself a _rational_ Jew, one who accepts what
is reasonable and true.

"It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind and
consecrate change as a dependent growth--yea, consecrate it with
kinship; the past becomes my parent, and the future stretches toward me
the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of
special kindred that makes the families of man rich in interchanged
wealth, and various as the forests are various with the glory of the
cedar and the palm?"