audience like a spell.

The finest religious music in Berlin is rendered on Friday evenings at
sunset, in the great Jewish synagogue in the Oranienburger Strasse,
built at a cost of six million marks, and said to be the best in
Europe. The spacious interior seats nearly five thousand, with pews on
the main floor for men only, and galleries for the women. Three
thousand burning gas-jets above and behind the rich stained glass of
the dome and side windows give an effect remarkable both for beauty
and weirdness. The building without loses much by its close
surroundings of ordinary houses, but the Moorish arches and
decorations within are unique and effective. Over the sacred
enclosure, where a red light always burns, and which contains the ark
"of the law and the testimony," a gallery across the eastern end holds
the fine organ, and accommodates the choir of eighty trained singers.
Christmas eve happened in 1886 on a Friday; so, before the later
German Christian home festival to which we were invited, we wended our
way to the Jewish weekly sunset service. Neither among the men nor the
women was there much outward evidence of devotion. In the female
countenances around me in the gallery the well-known Jewish
physiognomy was almost universal. While the rabbi read the service,
with his back to the audience, most followed in their Hebrew books;
but one by one many men slipped out, as though they were "on 'Change"
and did not care to stay any longer to-day. The women remained, but
with a slightly perfunctory air in most cases. One old crone before me
seemed touched with the true pathos which belongs to her race and its
history. She followed the service intently, swaying her body back and
forth in time with the beautiful music, and ever and anon breaking
forth in a low, sweet, plaintive strain with her own voice. Oh the
longing of such lives, waiting to find through the centuries the
realization of a hope never fulfilled and growing ever more and more
dim! My Puritanism had been scarcely reconciled to the crucifix and
the candles of the Protestant churches in Berlin, but now, if my life
and hopes had depended on the religion of this Jewish ceremonial, I
would have given worlds to find a crucifix in the vacant space above
their Sacred Ark. These sweet strains of exquisite music seem to give
voice without articulation to the unrevealed, imprisoned longing of
the Jewish heart for something better than it knows. I could only
comp