deed as a fiery scourge. Too late he realized that the passion for
Truth had destroyed him. Knowledge alone was not sufficient for life.
The will and the emotions demanded their nutriment and exercise as
well as the intellect. Man was not made merely to hunt an abstract
formula, pale ghost of living realities.

"To seek for Truth"--yes, it was one ideal. But there remained
also--as the quotation went on which Mendelssohn's disciples had
chosen as their motto--"To love the beautiful, to desire the good, to
do the best." Mendelssohn with his ordered scheme of harmonious
living, with his equal grasp of thought and life, sanely balanced
betwixt philosophy and letters, learning and business, according so
much to Hellenism, yet not losing hold of Hebraism, and adjusting with
equal mind the claims of the Ghetto and the claims of Culture,
Mendelssohn shone before Maimon's dying eyes, as indeed the Wise.

The thinker had a last gleam of satisfaction in seeing so lucidly the
springs of his failure as a human being. Happiness was the child of
fixedness--in opinions, in space. Soul and body had need of a centre,
a pivot, a home.

He had followed the hem of Truth to the mocking horizon: he had in
turn fanatically adopted every philosophical system Peripatetic,
Spinozist, Leibnozist, Leibnitzian, Kantian--and what did he know now
he was going beyond the horizon? Nothing. He had won a place among the
thinkers of Germany. But if he could only have had his cast-off son to
close his dying eyes, and could only have believed in the prayers his
David would have sobbed out, how willingly would he have consented to
be blotted out from the book of fame. A Passover tune hummed in his
brain, sad, sweet tears sprang to his eyes--yea, his soul found more
satisfaction in a meaningless melody charged with tremulous memories
of childhood, than in all the philosophies.

A melancholy synagogue refrain quavered on his lips, his soul turned
yearningly towards these ascetics and mystics, whose life was a
voluntary martyrdom to a misunderstood righteousness, a passionate
sacrifice to a naive conception of the cosmos. The infinite pathos of
their lives touched him to forgetfulness of his own futility. His
soul went out to them, but his brain denied him the comfort of their
illusions.

He set his teeth and waited for death.

The Pastor spoke again: "Yes, you have been foolish. But that you say
so now shows your soul is not beyond redemption. Christ is