the religious
imagination in "Rabbi Ben Ezra" is strongly touched with the gorgeous
and solemn realism which distinguishes the Old Testament from the new.

The most striking feature of Rabbi Ben Ezra's philosophy is his estimate
of age. According to him the soul is eternal, but it completes the first
stage of its experience in the earthly life; and the climax of the
earthly life is attained, not in the middle of it, but at its close. Age
is therefore a period, not only of rest, but of fruition.

"Spiritual conflict is appropriate to youth. It is well that youth
should sigh for the impossible, and, if needs be, blunder in the
endeavour to improve what is. He would be a brute whose body could keep
pace with his soul. The highest test of man's bodily powers is the
distance to which they can project the soul on the way which it must
travel alone."

"But life in the flesh is good, showering gifts alike on sense and
brain. It is right that at some period of its existence man's heart
should beat in unison with it; that having seen God's power in the
scheme of creation, he should also see the perfectness of His love; that
he should thank Him for his manhood, for the power conferred on him to
live and learn. And this boon must be granted by age, which gathers in
the inheritance of youth."

"The inheritance is not one of earthly wisdom. Man learns to know the
right and the good, but he does not learn how outwardly to apply the
knowledge; for human judgments are formed to differ, and there is no one
who can arbitrate between them. Man's failure or success must be sought
in the unseen life--not in that which he has done, but in that which he
has aspired to do."

"Nothing dies or changes which has truly BEEN. The flight of time is but
the spinning of the potter's wheel to which we are as clay. This fleeing
circumstance is but the machinery which stamps the soul (that vessel
moulded for the Great Master's hand). And its latest impress is the
best: though the base of the cup be adorned with laughing loves, while
skull-like images constitute its rim."

"Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's-peal,
The new wine's foaming flow,
The Master's lips a-glow!
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's
wheel?"
(vol. vii. p. 119)

"DEAF AND DUMB" conveys, in a sin