And as postscript to the ‘law’ obtaining on these cheery social forms of ‘charity’ a tombstone may perhaps be permitted to add its curious crumbling bit of evidence. In the House of Life, as Jews name their burial-grounds, at Prague, there stood--perhaps stands still--a stone, erected to the memory, and recording the virtues, of a certain rich lady who died in 1628. Her benefactions, many and minute, are set forth at length, and amongst the rest, and before ‘she clothed the naked,’ comes the item, ‘she ran like a bird to weddings.’ Through the mists of those terrible stories, which make of Prague so miserable a memory to Jews, the record of this long-ago dead woman gleams like a rainbow. One seems to see the bright little figure, a trifle out of breath may be, the gay plumage perhaps just a shade ruffled--somehow one does not fancy her a very prim or tidy personage--running ‘like a bird to weddings.’ She seems, the dear sympathetic soul, in an odd, suggestive sort of way, to illustrate the charitable system of her race, and to show us that, despite all differences of time and place and circumstances, the one essential condition to any ‘charity’ that shall prove effectual remains unchanged; that the solution of the hard problem, which may be worked out in a hundred ways, is just sympathy, and is to be learnt, not in the ‘speaking from afar’ of rich to poor, but in the ‘laying of hands’ upon them. The close fellowship of this ancient primitive system is perhaps impossible in our more complex civilisation, but an approximation to it is an ideal worth striving after. More intimate, more everyday communion between West and East, more ‘Valentines’ at Hoxton are sorely needed. Concert-giving, class-teaching, ‘visiting,’ are all helps of a sort, but there are so many days in a poor man’s week, so many hours in his dull day. Sweetness and light, like other and more prosaic products of civilisation, need, it may be, to be ‘laid on’ in those miles of monotonous streets, long breaks in continuity being fatal to results. MOSES MENDELSSOHN ‘I wish, it is true, to shame the opprobrious sentiments commonly entertained of a Jew, but it is by character and not by controversy that I would do it.’[32] So wrote the subject of this memoir more than a hundred years ago, and the sentence may well stand for the motto of his life; for much as Moses Mendelssohn achieved by his ability, much more did he by his conduct, and great as he was as a philosopher, far greater was he as a man. Starting with every possible disadvantage--prejudice, poverty, and deformity--he yet reached the goal of ‘honour, fame, and troops of friends’ by simple force of character; and thus he remains for all time an illustration of the happy optimistic theory that, even in this world, success, in the best sense of the word, does come to those who, also in the best sense of the word, deserve it.