-thank God!--to have
its end. Egyptians, Americans, Galicians, Englishmen, Russians,
Dutchmen, they had only one last migration before them--that which he,
Aaron, was now accomplishing. To his joy one of his new
acquaintances--the Russian--shared the dream of a Palestine flowing
once more with milk and honey and holy doctrine, was a member of a
"Lovers of Zion" society. He was a pasty-faced young man with gray
eyes and eyebrows and a reddish beard. He wore frowsy clothes, with an
old billy-cock and a dingy cotton shirt, but he combined all the lore
of the old-fashioned, hard-shell Jew with a living realization of what
his formulae meant, and so the close of Aaron's voyage--till the
Russian landed at Alexandria--was softened and shortened by sitting
worshipfully at this idealist's feet, drinking in quotations from
Bachja's _Duties of the Heart_ or Saadja Gaon's _Book of the Faith_.
There was not wanting some one to play Sancho Panza, for the German
Jew, while binding his arm piously with phylacteries in the publicity
of the swarming deck, loved to pose as a man of common sense, free
from superstition.

"The only reason men go to Palestine," he maintained, "is because they
think, as the psalm says, the land forgives sin. And they believe,
too, that those bodies which are not burned in Palestine, when the
Messiah's last trump sounds, will have to roll under lands and seas to
get to Jerusalem. So they go to die there, so as to escape the
underground route. Besides, Maimonides says the Messianic period will
only last forty years. So perhaps they are afraid all the fun will be
over and the Leviathan eaten up before they arrive."

"Fools there are always in the world," replied the Russian, "and their
piety cannot give them brains. These literal folk are the sort who
imagine that the Temple expanded miraculously, because the Talmud says
howsoever great a multitude flocked to worship therein, there was
always room for them. Do you not see what a fine metaphor that is!
Even so the Third Temple will be of the Spirit, not of Fire, as these
literal materialists translate the prophecy. As the prophet Joel says,
'I will pour out my Spirit. Your old men shall dream dreams, your
young men shall see visions,' And this Spirit is working to-day. But
through our own souls. No Messiah will ever come from a split heaven.
If a Christian does anything wrong, it is the individual; if a Jew, it
is the nation. Why? Because we have no country, an