This was one of the favorite ideas of George Eliot, which she has again and again expressed. She was impressed with the conviction that such a national life is necessary to the world's growth and welfare, that the era of a common brotherhood, dissociated from national traditions and hopes, has not yet come. Hence her belief that Judaism ought to speak the voice of a united race, occupying the old home of this people, and sending forth its ideas as a national inheritance and inspiration. This belief inspires the concluding words of her essay, as well as the last chapters of the novel. There is still a great function for the steadfastness of the Jew: not that he should shut out the utmost illumination which knowledge can throw on his national history, but that he should cherish the store of inheritance which that history has left him. Every Jew should be conscious that he is one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortal achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to them a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their fathers. There is a sense which the worthy child of a nation that has brought forth industrious prophets, high and unique among the poets of the world, is bound by their visions. Is bound? Yes; for the effective bond of human action is feeling, and the worthy child of a people owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite and Jew, feels his kinship with the glories and the sorrows, the degradation and the possible renovation of his national family. Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call his doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding superstition--the superstition that a theory of human well-being can be constructed in disregard of the influences which have made us human.