"Now I see that thou hast never understood our holy and beautiful religion. Men of culture, forsooth! Is not our Amsterdam congregation full of men of culture—grammarians, poets, exegetes, philosophers, jurists, but flesh and blood, mark you, not diagrams, cut out of Euclid? Whence the cohesion of our race? Ceremony! What preserves and unifies its scattered atoms throughout the world? Ceremony! And what is ceremony? Poetry. 'Tis the tradition handed down from hoary antiquity; 'tis the color of life."
"'Tis a miserable thraldom," interposed Uriel more feebly.
"Miserable! A happy service. Hast never danced at the Rejoicing of the Law? Who so joyous as our brethren? Where so cheerful a creed? The trouble with thee is that thou hast no childish associations with our glorious religion, thou camest to it in manhood with naught but the cold eye of Reason."
"But thou dost not accept every invention of Rabbinism. Surely in Porto thou didst not practise everything."
"I kept what I could. I believe what I can. If I have my private doubts, why should I set them up to perplex the community withal? There's a friend of mine in this very city—not to mention names—but a greater heretic, I ween, than even thou. But doth he shatter the peace of the vulgar? Nay, not he: he hath a high place in the synagogue, is a blessing to the Jewry, and confideth his doubts to me in epistles writ in elegant Latin. Nay, nay, Senhor Da Costa, the world loves not battering-rams."
And as the old physician spoke, Uriel began dimly to suspect that he had misconceived human life, taken it too earnestly, and at his heart was a hollow aching sense of futile sacrifice. And with it a suspicion that he had mistaken Judaism, too—missed the poetry and humanity behind the forms, and, as he gazed wistfully at Ianthe's tender clouded face, he felt the old romantic sense of brotherhood stirring again. How wonderful to be reabsorbed into his race, fused with Ianthe!
But Right Reason resurged in relentless ascendency, and he knew that his thought could never more go back on itself, that he could never again place faith in any Revelation.
"I will be an ape among apes," he thought bitterly.
XI
And the more he pondered upon this resolution, after Dom Diego had indignantly shaken off the dust of his threshold, the more he was confirmed in it. To outwit the Jewry would be the bitterest revenge, to pay lip-service to its ideals and laugh at it in his sleeve. And thus, too, he would circumvent its dreaded design to seize upon his property. Deception? Ay, but the fault was theirs who drove him to it, leaving him only a leper's life. In the Peninsula they had dissembled among Christians; he would dissemble among Jews, aping the ancient apes. He foresaw no difficulty in the recantation. And—famous idea!—his brother Joseph, poor, dear fool, should bring it about under the illusion that he was the instrument of Providence: for to employ Dom Diego as go-between were to risk the scenting of his real motive. Then, when the Synagogue had taken him to its sanctimonious arms, Ianthe—overwhelming thought!—would become his wife. He had little doubt of that; her farewell glance, after her father's back was turned, was sweet with promises and beseechments, and a brief note from her early the next morning dissipated his last doubts.