laim your right to be one of His
chosen people. In the smooth current of daily life you proudly number
yourselves with his enemies. Do not interrupt me, and answer honestly
what I shall ask you. In what hour of your life did you feel yourself
that you owed the deepest gratitude to the God of your fathers?"

"Why should I deny it?--In the hour when my lost wife presented me with
my first-born son."

"And you called him?"

"You know his name is Benjamin."

"Like the favorite son of our forefather Jacob, for in the hour when you
thus named him you were honestly yourself, you felt thankful that it had
been vouchsafed to you to add another link to the chain of your race--you
were a Jew--you were confident in our God--in your own God. The birth of
your second son touched your soul less deeply and you gave him the name
of Theophilus, and when your third male child was born you had altogether
ceased to remember the God of your fathers, for he is named after one of
the heathen gods, Hephaestion. To put it shortly: You are Jews when the
Lord is most gracious to you, or threatens to try you most severely but
you are heathen whenever your way does not lead you over the high hills
or through the dark abysses of life. I cannot change your hearts--but the
wife of my brother's son, the daughter of Ben Akiba, must be a daughter
of our people, morning, noon, and night. I seek a Rebecca for my daughter
and not an Ismene."

"I did not ask you here," retorted Apollodorus. "But if you quit us
to-morrow, you as will be followed by our reverent regard. Think no worse
of us because we adapt ourselves, more, perhaps, than is fitting, to the
ways and ideas of the people among whom we have grown up, and in whose
midst we have been prosperous, and whose interests are ours. We know how
high our faith is beyond theirs. In our hearts we still are Jews; but are
we not bound to try to open and to cultivate and to elevate our spirits,
which God certainly made of stuff no coarser than that of other nations,
whenever and wherever we may? And in what school may our minds be trained
better or on sounder principles than in ours--I mean that of the Greek
sages? The knowledge of the Most High--"

"That knowledge," cried the old man, gesticulating vehemently with his
arms. "The knowledge of God Most High and all that the most refined
philosophy can prove, all the sublimest and purest of the thinkers of
whom you speak can only apprehend by the gravest medit