Once find a man’s ideals, it has been well said, and the rest is easy; and undoubtedly to get at any true notion of character, one must discover these. They may be covered close with conventionalities, or jealously hidden, like buried treasures, from unsympathetic eyes; but the patient search is well worth while, since it is his ideals--and not his words nor his deeds, which a thousand circumstances influence and decide--which show us the real man as known to his Maker. And true as this is of the individual, it is true in a deeper and larger sense of the nations, and most true of all of that people with whom for centuries speech was impolitic and action impossible. With articulate expression so long denied to them, the national ideals must be always to the student of history the truest revelation of Judaism; and it is curious and interesting to trace their development, and to recognise the crown and apex of them all in battlefield and in ‘Vineyard,’ in Ghetto and in mart, unchanged among the changes, and practically the same as in the days of the desert. The germ was set in the wilderness, when, amid the thunders and lightnings of Sinai, a crowd of frightened, freshly rescued slaves were made ‘witnesses’ to a living God, and guardians of a ‘Law’ which demonstrated His existence. Very new and strange, and but dimly understanded of the people it must all have been. ‘The lights of sunset and of sunrise mixed.’ The fierce vivid glow under which they had bent and basked in Egypt had scarcely faded, when they were bid look up in the grey dawn of the desert to receive their trust. There was worthy stuff in the descendants of the man who had left father and friends and easy, sensuous idolatry to follow after an ideal of righteousness; and they who had but just escaped from the bondage of centuries, rose to the occasion. They accepted their mission; ‘All that the Lord has spoken will we do,’ came up a responsive cry from ‘all the people answering together,’ and in that supreme moment the ill-fed and so recently ill-treated groups were transformed into a nation. ‘I will make of thee a great people’; ‘Through thee shall all families of the earth be blessed’; the meaning of such predictions was borne in upon them in one bewildering flash, and in that flash the national idea of Judaism found its dawn; they, the despised and the downtrodden, were to become trustees of civilisation.