e world was indeed most beautiful and most varied. Terence was
right: the comedy and pathos of things was enough. We are a sufficient
spectacle to one another. A glow came over him; for a moment he
grasped hold on life, and the infinite tentacles of things threw
themselves out to entwine him.

_And a water came and extinguished the fire, which had burnt the
staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had
devoured the kid, which my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya!
Chad Gadya!_

But the glow faded, and he drew back sad and hopeless. For he knew now
what he wanted. Paganism would not suffice. He wanted--he hungered
after--God. The God of his fathers. The three thousand years of belief
could not be shaken off. It was atavism that gave him those sudden
strange intuitions of God at the scent of a rose, the sound of a
child's laughter, the sight of a sleeping city; that sent a warmth to
his heart and tears to his eyes, and a sense of the infinite beauty
and sacredness of life. But he could not have the God of his fathers.
And his own God was distant and dubious, and nothing that modern
science had taught him was yet registered in his organism. Could he
even transmit it to descendants? What was it Weismann said about
acquired characteristics? No, certain races put forth certain beliefs,
and till you killed off the races, you could never kill off the
beliefs. Oh, it was a cruel tragedy, this Western culture grafted on
an Eastern stock, untuning the chords of life, setting heart and
brain asunder. But then Nature _was_ cruel. He thought of last year's
grape-harvest ruined by a thunderstorm, the frightful poverty of the
peasants under the thumb of the padrones. And then the vision came up
of a captured cuttle-fish he had seen gasping, almost with a human
cough, on the sands of the Lido. It had spoilt the sublimity of that
barren stretch of sand and sea, and the curious charm of the white
sails that seemed to glide along the very stones of the great
breakwater. His soul demanded justice for the uncouth cuttle-fish. He
did not understand how people could live in a self-centred spiritual
world that shut out the larger part of creation. If suffering
purified, what purification did overdriven horses undergo, or starved
cats? The miracle of creation--why was it wrought for puppies doomed
to drown? No; man had imposed morality on a non-moral universe,
anthropomorphizing everything, transferring into the gr