“Undoubtedly you put your finger on an evil.  But there is religious edification in common prayers and ceremonies even when divorced from meaning.  Remember the Latin prayers of the Catholic poor.  Jews may be below Judaism, but are not all men below their creed?  If the race which gave the world the Bible knows it least—­” He stopped suddenly, for Addie was playing pianissimo, and although she was his sister, he did not like to put her out.

“It comes to this,” said Esther when Chopin spoke louder, “our prayer-book needs depolarization, as Wendell Holmes says of the Bible.”

“Exactly,” assented Raphael.  “And what our people need is to make acquaintance with the treasure of our own literature.  Why go to Browning for theism, when the words of his ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ are but a synopsis of a famous Jewish argument: 

      “’I see the whole design. 
    I, who saw Power, see now Love, perfect too. 
      Perfect I call Thy plan,
      Thanks that I was a man! 
    Maker, remaker, complete, I trust what thou shalt do.’

“It sounds like a bit of Bachja.  That there is a Power outside us nobody denies; that this Power works for our good and wisely, is not so hard to grant when the facts of the soul are weighed with the facts of Nature.  Power, Love, Wisdom—­there you have a real trinity which makes up the Jewish God.  And in this God we trust, incomprehensible as are His ways, unintelligible as is His essence.  ’Thy ways are not My ways nor Thy thoughts My thoughts.’  That comes into collision with no modern philosophies; we appeal to experience and make no demands upon the faculty for believing things ‘because they are impossible.’  And we are proud and happy in that the dread Unknown God of the infinite Universe has chosen our race as the medium by which to reveal His will to the world.  We are sanctified to His service.  History testifies that this has verily been our mission, that we have taught the world religion as truly as Greece has taught beauty and science.  Our miraculous survival through the cataclysms of ancient and modern dynasties is a proof that our mission is not yet over.”

The sonata came to an end; Percy Saville started a comic song, playing his own accompaniment.  Fortunately, it was loud and rollicking.

“And do you really believe that we are sanctified to God’s service?” said Esther, casting a melancholy glance at Percy’s grimaces.

“Can there be any doubt of it?  God made choice of one race to be messengers and apostles, martyrs at need to His truth.  Happily, the sacred duty is ours,” he said earnestly, utterly unconscious of the incongruity that struck Esther so keenly.  And yet, of the two, he had by far the greater gift of humor.  It did not destroy his idealism, but kept it in touch with things mundane.  Esther’s vision, though more penetrating, lacked this corrective of humor, which makes always for breadth of view.  Perhaps it was because she was a woman, that the trivial, sordid details of life’s comedy hurt her so acutely that she could scarcely sit out the play patiently.  Where Raphael would have admired the lute, Esther was troubled by the little rifts in it.