Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/20

 womb have sprung the religions which rule mankind, still to be called upon, at the grave of her daughters, to comfort and lift up a despairing world? Or will the semblance of unity which, even now, if invisibly, binds together her dismembered limbs, grow paler and paler in the sunlight of progress? Will the hopes with which the thirsty have for centuries allayed their pangs keep ever running drier and drier, and finally shrink to the miserable remnant to which they are compared by shallow merriment? Are the Jews still a people, a sickly body indeed, but one to which youth and health may return, or a bleached and scattered heap of bones? Are these bones destined ever again to live and move? The questions which arise in the contemplative mind at the spectacle of the Jewish community are not easy to answer.

And what are the opinions of the Jews