"May the Lord bless thee, and keep thee. May the Lord let his countenance shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee! The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace."
The two men met each other at the door, and walked homeward together through the twilight.
Cragmore had found a boarding place. It was not far from the temple.
"Come up to my room," he said to Marion. "I see you still have Herschel's prayer-book with you. I want to compare the mission of Israel as given there with the one I was reading to-day of Leroy-Beaulieu's. I have never known before to-day what special hope they clung to. Come in and I will find the paragraph."
He lighted the gas in his room, pushed a chair over towards his guest, and, seating himself, began rapidly turning the leaves of the book.
"Here it is," he said, and he read as follows:
"Then at last Jewish faith, freed from all tribal spirit and purified of all national dross, will become the law of humanity. The world that jeered at the long suffering of Israel, will witness the fulfillment of prophecies delayed for twenty centuries by the blindness of the scribes, and the stubbornness of the rabbis. According to the words of the prophets, the nations will come to learn of Israel, and the people will hang to the skirts of her garments, crying, 'Let us go up together to the mountain of Jehovah, to the house of the Lord of Israel, that he may teach us to walk in his ways.' The true spiritual religion, for which the world has been sighing since Luther and Voltaire, will be imparted to it through Israel. To accomplish this, Israel needs but to discard her old practices, as in spring the oak shakes off the dead leaves of winter. The divine trust, the legacy of her prophets, which has been preserved intact beneath her heavy ritual, will be transmitted to the Gentiles by an Israel emancipated from all enslavement to form. Then only, after having infused the spirit of the Thora into the souls of all men, will Israel, her mission accomplished, be able to merge herself in the nations."
"See what a hopeless hope," said Cragmore, as he closed the book. "And yet do you know, Frank, I am becoming more and more sure that Israel has some great part to play in the conversion of humanity? Any one must see that nothing short of Divine power could have kept them intact as a race, and Divine power is never aimlessly exerted. There must be some great reason for such a miraculous preservation. What missionaries of the cross these people would make! What torch-bearers they have been! They have carried the altar-fires of Jehovah to every alien shore they have touched."
Cragmore stood up in his earnestness, his eyes alight with something akin to prophetic fire.