arians, poets, exegetes, philosophers,
jurists, but flesh and blood, mark you, not diagrams, cut out of
Euclid? Whence the cohesion of our race? Ceremony! What preserves and
unifies its scattered atoms throughout the world? Ceremony! And what
is ceremony? Poetry. 'Tis the tradition handed down from hoary
antiquity; 'tis the color of life."

"'Tis a miserable thraldom," interposed Uriel more feebly.

"Miserable! A happy service. Hast never danced at the Rejoicing of the
Law? Who so joyous as our brethren? Where so cheerful a creed? The
trouble with thee is that thou hast no childish associations with our
glorious religion, thou camest to it in manhood with naught but the
cold eye of Reason."

"But thou dost not accept every invention of Rabbinism. Surely in
Porto thou didst not practise everything."

"I kept what I could. I believe what I can. If I have my private
doubts, why should I set them up to perplex the community withal?
There's a friend of mine in this very city--not to mention names--but
a greater heretic, I ween, than even thou. But doth he shatter the
peace of the vulgar? Nay, not he: he hath a high place in the
synagogue, is a blessing to the Jewry, and confideth his doubts to me
in epistles writ in elegant Latin. Nay, nay, Senhor Da Costa, the
world loves not battering-rams."

And as the old physician spoke, Uriel began dimly to suspect that he
had misconceived human life, taken it too earnestly, and at his heart
was a hollow aching sense of futile sacrifice. And with it a suspicion
that he had mistaken Judaism, too--missed the poetry and humanity
behind the forms, and, as he gazed wistfully at Ianthe's tender
clouded face, he felt the old romantic sense of brotherhood stirring
again. How wonderful to be reabsorbed into his race, fused with
Ianthe!

But Right Reason resurged in relentless ascendency, and he knew that
his thought could never more go back on itself, that he could never
again place faith in any Revelation.

"I will be an ape among apes," he thought bitterly.

XI

And the more he pondered upon this resolution, after Dom Diego had
indignantly shaken off the dust of his threshold, the more he was
confirmed in it. To outwit the Jewry would be the bitterest revenge,
to pay lip-service to its ideals and laugh at it in his sleeve. And
thus, too, he would circumvent its dreaded design to seize upon his
property. Deception? Ay, but the fault was theirs who drove him to it,
leaving him on