Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/67

lision with his own. How shallow, how unsatisfactory, almost mask-like these characters appear, wanting as they are in deep purpose and high yearning, beside Mordecai, that noble flower springing from the dust, that humble Jewish hero! What a people must that be which can produce from its very lowest ranks so pure and lofty a religious genius as Mordecai; and what a system must that be in which a mother's ideal presence is sufficient to keep a daughter modest and dutiful in the very slough of temptation! I am far from imagining that a thinker and poetess of George Eliot's calibre would ever have attempted to represent Judaism as the only source of high-mindedness, and the Jews as the sole and hereditary possessors of all morality. As she herself says, the Caribs regard thieving as a practice peculiarly connected with Christian tenets, because they have chiefly