...But, on the other hand, I think I may flatter myself that I can better comprehend, in the first part of the holy book, the character of Moses. His grand figure has impressed me not a little. What a colossal form! I cannot imagine that Og, King of Bashan, could have looked more giant-like. How insignificant does Sinai appear when Moses stands thereon! That mountain is merely a pedestal for the feet of the man whose head towers in the heavens and there holds converse with God. May God forgive the sacrilegious thought! but sometimes it appears to me as if this Mosaic God were only the reflected radiance of Moses himself, whom he so strongly represents in wrath and in love. It were a sin, it were anthropomorphism, to assume such an identity of God and his prophet; but the resemblance is most striking. I had not previously much admired the character of Moses, probably because the Hellenic spirit was predominant in me, and I could not pardon the lawgiver of the Jews for his hate of the plastic arts. I failed to perceive that Moses, notwithstanding his enmity to art, was nevertheless himself a great artist, and possessed the true artistic spirit. Only, this artistic spirit with him, as with his Egyptian countrymen, was applied to the colossal and the imperishable. But not, like the Egyptians, did he construct his works of art from bricks and granite, but he built human pyramids and carved human obelisks. He took a poor shepherd tribe and from it created a nation which should defy centuries; a great, an immortal, a consecrated race, a God-serving people, who to all other nations should be as a model and prototype: he created Israel. I have never spoken with proper reverence either of the artist or of his work, the Jews; and for the same reason--namely, my Hellenic temperament, which was opposed to Jewish asceticism. My prejudice in favour of Hellas has declined since then. I see now that the Greeks were only beautiful youths, but that the Jews were always men, strong, unyielding men, not only in the past, but to this very day, in spite of eighteen centuries of persecution and suffering. Since that time I have learned to appreciate them better, and, were not all pride of ancestry a silly inconsistency in a champion of the revolution and its democratic principles, the writer of these pages would be proud that his ancestors belonged to the noble house of Israel, that he is a descendant of those martyrs who gave the world a God and a morality, and who have fought and suffered on all the battle-fields of thought.