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George Eliot and Judaism.

the law, which gladly countenances, indeed, all attacks made upon it, and all attempts aimed at its suppression. The globe is overrun with the inevitable plant; what will restrain its unceasing fecundity? Men are almost beginning to abandon themselves helplessly to what cannot be altered, and to study what use there may be in a phenomenon which they cannot get rid of, no matter how well assured they are of its injurious nature.

The comparison may well halt, for it refers to an unique, incomparable existence, the riddle of the history of nations—the Jews. Destroyed as the national independence of Judæa was by Rome, from the bones of the vanquished there had already arisen—the Avenger; a branch severed from the parent trunk became a rod of correction for the oppressor; and a solitary Jewish idea sufficed, in its disfigurement, to shatter the