oo tolerantly."

"What, Herr Maimon," and Mendelssohn smiled the half-sad smile of the
sage, who has seen the humors of the human spectacle and himself as
part of it--"would you have me rebuke intolerance by intolerance? I
will admit that when I was your age--and of an even hotter temper--I
could have made a pretty persecutor. In those days I contributed to
the mildest of sheets, 'The Moral Preacher,' we young blades called
it. But because it didn't reek of religion, on every page the pious
scented atheism. I could have whipped the dullards or cried with
vexation. Now I see intolerance is a proof of earnestness as well as
of stupidity. It is well that men should be alert against the least
rough breath on the blossoms of faith they cherish. The only criticism
that still has power to annoy me is that of the timid, who fear it is
provoking persecution for a Jew to speak out. But for the rest,
opposition is the test-furnace of new ideas. I do my part in the
world, it is for others to do theirs. As soon as I had yielded my
translation to friend Dubno, to be printed, I took my soul in my
hands, raised my eyes to the mountains, and gave my back to the
smiters. All the same I am sorry it is the Rabbi of Posen who is
launching these old-fashioned thunders against the German Pentateuch
of "Moses of Dessau," for both as a Talmudist and mathematician
Hirsch Janow has my sincere respect. Not in vain is he styled 'the
keen scholar,' and from all I hear he is a truly good man."

"A saint!" cried Maimon enthusiastically, again forgetting his
shyness. His voice faltered as he drew a glowing panegyric of his
whilom benefactor, and pictured him as about to die in the prime of
life, worn out by vigils and penances. In a revulsion of feeling,
fresh stirrings of doubt of the Mendelssohnian solution agitated his
soul. Though he had but just now denounced the fanatics, he was
conscious of a strange sympathy with this lovable ascetic who fasted
every day, torturing equally his texts and himself, this hopeless
mystic for whom there could be no bridge to modern thought; all the
Polish Jew in him revolted irrationally against the new German
rationalism. No, no; it must be all or nothing. Jewish Catholicism was
not to be replaced by Jewish Protestantism. These pathetic zealots,
clinging desperately to the past, had a deeper instinct, a truer
prevision of the future, than this cultured philosopher.

"Yes, what you tell me of Hirsch Janow goes wit