Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/18

truth abide. Thus, harassed by all, they have survived all; and when the dawn of a happier age began to break for them as for others, it illuminated a people numerically greater after eighteen hundred years of oppression and persecution than in the days of its highest power, and a race able to enrich every literature of the world from its treasures, even after men had inhumanly and treacherously sought to deprive its mental life of light and air. Use and wont are the hereditary enemies of every novel and striking phenomenon; and it has long since been pointed out that the workings of Nature make small claim upon our admiration, only because we have been accustomed to move among them from our cradles. In this way the world has come to regard the Jews as a matter of course, and has grown dull to the miracle which a contemplation of their existence reveals—which is humorously expressed by Heine