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said, 'The majesty of the Eternal cometh near.'" And with regard to their wretched father he comforts his sister with the words, "Seest thou, our lot is the lot of Israel? The grief and the glory are mingled, as the smoke and the flame. It is because we children have inherited the good that we feel the evil. These things are wedded for us, as our father was wedded to our mother." Such a union, not indeed of actual good and evil, but of traits apparently contradictory, is revealed to us in Mordecai's whole being, for we find in it the divinest flights of imagination joined to the keenest worldly wisdom, and the utmost fervour of enthusiasm combined with the healthiest common-sense. Hence it is peculiarly characteristic that he cannot conceive the fulfiller of his ideas and the hero of his race as other than a noble, prosperous, and cultivated man of the world. When Akiba-ben-Joseph, enrap-