But save with such few and faithful dreamers, memory scarcely blossoms into hope, and hope most certainly has not yet ripened into strong desire. It may come; but at present we apprehend the majority of Jews see the ‘future of Judaism’ not in the form of a centralised and localised nationality, but rather in the destiny foreshadowed by our author, in which ‘Israel will be greatest when she labours under every zone,’ when ‘her children shall have spread themselves abroad, bearing the ineradicable seeds of eternal truth’ (pp. 86, 87). This conception of ‘nationality’ would point rather to a spiritual than to a temporal sovereignty, to a supremacy of mind rather than of matter, and appears to be in accord with the tone pervading both ancient and modern Jewish literature, which exhibits Judaism as a perpetual living force, maintained from within rather than from without, and destined continually to influence religious thought, and to survive all dispensations. In his undefined mission to the East Deronda is, therefore, to that extent perhaps, out of harmony with the general tone of modern Jewish thought. We at least are constrained to think that more Jews of the present day would be ready to follow Mordecai in imagination than Deronda in person to Judæa. It is, nevertheless, in strict artistic unity that, shut out for five-and-twenty years from actual practical knowledge of his people, Deronda should represent the _ideal_ rather than the _idea_ of Judaism. Mordecai, sketched as he is supposed to be from the life, with his deep poetic yearnings, which are stayed on the threshold of action, strikes us as a truer and more typical figure than Deronda hastening to their fulfilment. And on the subject of these same vague yearnings another point suggests itself. We have heard it said that the religious belief of Mordecai centres rather in the destiny of his race than in the Being who has appointed that destiny, and we have heard it questioned whether the theism of Mordecai is sufficiently defined to be fairly representative of Jewish thought, or if Judaism indeed is also passing under that wave of Pantheism which, like the waters of old, is threatening to submerge all ancient landmarks, and to leave visible only ‘the tops of the mountains’ of revealed religion. This seems a criticism based rather on negative than on positive evidence, and derived possibly from the obvious leanings of George Eliot’s other writings, and it is, perhaps, somewhat unfair to assume that, even if, on this point, she does not sympathise with the Jews, she has any intention of colouring her picture of modern Judaism with intellectual prepossessions of her own. In the silence of Mordecai with respect to his beliefs, he represents the great body of Jews, whose religion finds expression rather in action than in formula, and who are slow to indulge in theological speculations. Mordecai was true to Jewish characteristics in the fact that his belief was concealed beneath his