me. And if I ever
arrived at such a one, believe me, it would be by some such practical
demonstration as this very tent has given me.'

'This tent?'

'Yes, sir, this tent; within which I have seen you and your children
lead a life of deeds as new to me the Jew, as they would be to Hypatia
the Gentile. I have watched you for many a day, and not in vain. When I
saw you, an experienced officer, encumber your flight with wounded men,
I was only surprised. But since I have seen you and your daughter,
and, strangest of all, your gay young Alcibiades of a son, starving
yourselves to feed those poor ruffians--performing for them, day and
night, the offices of menial slaves--comforting them, as no man ever
comforted me--blaming no one but yourselves, caring for every one but
yourselves, sacrificing nothing but yourselves; and all this without
hope of fame or reward, or dream of appeasing the wrath of any god or
goddess, but simply because you thought it right.... When I saw that,
sir, and more which I have seen; and when, reading in this book here,
I found most unexpectedly those very grand moral rules which you were
practising, seeming to spring unconsciously, as natural results, from
the great thoughts, true or false, which had preceded them; then, sir, I
began to suspect that the creed which could produce such deeds as I have
watched within the last few days, might have on its side not merely a
slight preponderance of probabilities, but what the Jews used once to
call, when we believed in it--or in anything--the mighty power of God.'

And as he spoke, he looked into the Prefect's face with the look of a
man wrestling in some deadly struggle; so intense and terrible was the
earnestness of his eye, that even the old soldier shrank before it.

'And therefore,' he went on, 'therefore, sir, beware of your own
actions, and of your children's. If, by any folly or baseness, such as I
have seen in every human being whom I ever met as yet upon this accursed
stage of fools, you shall crush my new-budding hope that there is
something somewhere which will make me what I know that I ought to be,
and can be--If you shall crush that, I say, by any misdoing of yours,
you had better have been the murderer of my firstborn; with such a
hate--a hate which Jews alone can feel--will I hate you and yours.'

'God help us and strengthen us!'said the old warrior in a tone of noble
humility.

'And now,' said Raphael, glad to change the subject, af