The purpose of _Daniel Deronda_, however, is not merely to vindicate Judaism. This race and its religion are used as the vehicles for larger ideas, as an illustration of the supreme importance to mankind of spiritual aims concentrated into the form of national traditions and aspirations. Her own studies, and personal intercourse with the Jews, helped to attract her to this race; but the main cause of her use of them in this novel is their remarkable history. Their moral and spiritual persistence, their wonderful devotedness to their own race and its aims, admirably adapted them to develop for her the ideas she wished to express. What nation could she have taken that would have so clearly illustrated her theory of national memories and traditions? In the forty-second chapter of _Daniel Deronda_ she has put into the month of Mordecai her own theories on this subject. He vindicates his right to call himself a _rational_ Jew, one who accepts what is reasonable and true. "It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a dependent growth--yea, consecrate it with kinship; the past becomes my parent, and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that makes the families of man rich in interchanged wealth, and various as the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm?" He declares that each nation has its own work to do in the world, in the uplifting and maintenance of some special idea which is necessary to the welfare and development of humanity. The place he assigns to Judaism is precisely that which made it dear to George Eliot, because it embodied her conception of religion and its social functions. "Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and the reverence for the human body which lifts the needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and weak and to the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us." Again, he utters words which are simply an expression of George Eliot's own sentiments.