The Jews have shown themselves the sturdiest of mankind, but the influences brought to bear on them now are wholly different from those which they met with such stubborn courage of old. Political ambition, so long utterly closed to them, but to which Lord Beaconsfield’s career must evermore prove a spur; pleasure and self-indulgence, to which their wealth is an ever ready key; the scepticism and materialism of the time, to which their acute and positive minds seem to render them even more liable than their contemporaries,—these are not the elements out of which martyrs and confessors are made. A reformed, enlightened, world-wide creed, which a cultivated gentleman may frankly avow and defend in the _salons_ of London, Paris, Berlin, or New York, and in the progress of which he may feel some enthusiasm,—a creed which will make him free to adopt from Christianity all that he recognizes in it of spiritually lofty and morally beautiful,—such a creed may have a future before it of which no end need be foreseen. But for unreformed Judaism there can be nothing in store but the gradual dropping away of the ablest, the most cultured, the wealthiest, the men of the world and the men of the study,—the Spinozas, the Heines, the Disraelis—and the persistence only for a few generations of the more ignorant, fanatical, obscure, and poor. Again, besides giving to Judaism a new lease of life, the Reform projected would undoubtedly do much to extinguish that passion of _Judenhasse_ which is the disgrace of Eastern Christendom, and the source of such manifold woes to both races. The root of that passion is the newly awakened sense (to which I have just referred) of impatience at the existence of a nation within every nation, having separate interests of its own and a solidarity between its members, ramifying into every trade, profession, and concern of civil life. Were this solidarity to be relinquished, and the mutual secret co-operation of Jews[18] reduced to such natural and fitting friendliness as exists between Scotchmen in England, and were it to become common for Jews to marry Christians and discuss freely with Christians their respective views,—were this to happen, mutual respect and sympathy would very quickly supersede mutual prejudice and mistrust. After two generations of such Reformed Judaism, the memory of the difference of race would, I am persuaded, be reduced to that pleasant interest wherewith we trace the ancestry of some of our eminent statesmen to “fine old Quaker families,” or remark that some of our most brilliant men of letters have in their veins the marvellous Huguenot blood.[19]