“That is just the flaw of the modern world, to keep life and religion apart,” protested Raphael; “to have one set of principles for week-days and another for Sundays; to grind the inexorable mechanism of supply and demand on pagan principles, and make it up out of the poor-box.”

Strelitski shook his head.

“We must make broad our platform, not our phylacteries.  It is because I am with you in admiring the Rabbis that I would undo much of their work.  Theirs was a wonderful statesmanship, and they built wiser than they knew; just as the patient labors of the superstitious zealots who counted every letter of the Law preserved the text unimpaired for the benefit of modern scholarship.  The Rabbis constructed a casket, if you will, which kept the jewel safe, though at the cost of concealing its lustre.  But the hour has come now to wear the jewel on our breasts before all the world.  The Rabbis worked for their time—­we must work for ours.  Judaism was before the Rabbis.  Scientific criticism shows its thoughts widening with the process of the suns—­even as its God, Yahweh, broadened from a local patriotic Deity to the ineffable Name.  For Judaism was worked out from within—­Abraham asked, ’Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?’—­the thunders of Sinai were but the righteous indignation of the developed moral consciousness.  In every age our great men have modified and developed Judaism.  Why should it not be trimmed into concordance with the culture of the time?  Especially when the alternative is death.  Yes, death!  We babble about petty minutiae of ritual while Judaism is dying!  We are like the crew of a sinking ship, holy-stoning the deck instead of being at the pumps.  No, I must speak out; I cannot go on salving my conscience by unsigned letters to the press.  Away with all this anonymous apostleship!”

He moved about restlessly with animated gestures as he delivered his harangue at tornado speed, speech bursting from him like some dynamic energy which had been accumulating for years, and could no longer be kept in.  It was an upheaval of the whole man under the stress of pent forces.  Raphael was deeply moved.  He scarcely knew how to act in this unique crisis.  Dimly he foresaw the stir and pother there would be in the community.  Conservative by instinct, apt to see the elements of good in attacked institutions—­perhaps, too, a little timid when it came to take action in the tremendous realm of realities—­he was loth to help Strelitski to so decisive a step, though his whole heart went out to him in brotherly sympathy.

“Do not act so hastily,” he pleaded.  “Things are not so black as you see them—­you are almost as bad as Miss Ansell.  Don’t think that I see them rosy:  I might have done that three months ago.  But don’t you—­don’t all idealists—­overlook the quieter phenomena?  Is orthodoxy either so inefficacious or so moribund as you fancy?  Is there not a steady, perhaps semi-conscious, stream of healthy life, thousands of cheerful, well-ordered households, of people neither perfect nor cultured, but more good than bad?  You cannot expect saints and heroes to grow like blackberries.”