The idea of their trusteeship was a sheet anchor to the Jews as the waves and the billows passed over them. In the fifteen hundred years’ tragedy of their history there have been no _entr’actes_ of frenzied stampede or of revolutionary, revengeful conspiracy. A resolute endurance, which, characteristically enough, rarely approaches asceticism, marks the depth and strength and buoyancy of the national idea. Trustees of civilisation might not sigh nor sing in solitudes; nor with the feeling so keen that ‘a thousand years in Thy sight are but as a day,’ was it worth while to plot or plan against the oppressors of the moment. Time was on their side, and ‘that which shapes it to some perfect end.’ And this attitude explains, possibly, some unattractive phases of it, since however honestly the individual consciousness may be absorbed in a national conscience, yet the individual will generally, in some way, manage to express himself, and the self is not always quite up to the ideal, nor indeed is it always in harmony with those who would interpret it. When a David dances before the Ark it needs other than a daughter of Saul to understand him. There have been Jews in David’s case, their enthusiasm mocked at; and there have been Jews indifferent to their trust, and Jews who have betrayed it, and Jews too, and these not a few, who have pushed it into prominence with undue display. The infinite changes of circumstance and surrounding in Jewish fortunes no less than differences in individual character have induced a considerable divergence in the practical politics of the national idea. The persecuted have been exclusive over it, and the prosperous careless; it has been vulgarised by superstition, and ignored by indifferentism, till modern ‘rational’ thinkers now and again question whether Palestine be indeed the goal of Jewish separateness, and make it a matter for academic discussion whether ‘Jews’ mean a sect of cosmopolitan citizens with religious customs more or less in common, or a people whose religion has a national origin and a national purpose in its observances. With questioners such as these, Revelation, possibly, would not be admitted as sound evidence in reply, else the promise, ‘Ye shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,’ would, one might think, show a design that ritual by itself does not fulfil. It was no sect with ‘tribal’ customs, but a ‘nation’ and a ‘kingdom’ who were to be ‘holy to the Lord.’ But though texts may be inadmissible with those who prefer their sermons in stones, yet the records of the ages are little less impartial and unimpassioned than the records of the rocks, and doubters might find an answer in the insistent tones of history when she tells of the results of occasional unnatural divorce between religion and nationality among Jews.