"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. "The old thorny stem of Judaism shall yet bud and blossom into the perfect flower of Christianity!" he cried. "And when it does, O when it does, the 'chosen people' will become a veritable tree of life, whose leaves will be 'for the healing of the nations.'" CHAPTER XII. DR. TRENT. IT was a cold, bleak night in November. There was a blazing wood-fire on the library hearth. Bethany sat in a low chair in front of it, with a large, flat book in her lap, which she was using as a desk for her long-neglected letter-writing. An appetizing smell of pop-corn and boiling molasses found its way in from the cozy kitchen, where the sisters were treating Jack to an old-fashioned candy-pulling. The occasional gusts that rattled the windows made Bethany draw closer to the fire, with a grateful sense of warmth and comfort. She thoroughly appreciated her luxurious surroundings, and was glad she had the long, quiet evening ahead of her. For half an hour the steady trail of her pen along the paper, and the singing of the kettle on the crane, was all that was audible.