 deepest experience
of his affections with what was a pure supposition, namely, that Sir Hugo was
his father: that was a hypothesis which had been the source of passionate
struggle within him; by its light he had been accustomed to subdue feelings and
to cherish them. He had been well used to find a motive in a conception which
might be disproved; and he had been also used to think of some revelation that
might influence his view of the particular duties belonging to him. To be in a
state of suspense which was also one of emotive activity and scruple, was a
familiar attitude of his conscience.
    And now, suppose that wish-begotten belief in his Jewish birth, and that
extravagant demand of discipleship, to be the foreshadowing of an actual
discovery and a genuine spiritual result: suppose that Mordecai's ideas made a
real conquest over Deronda's conviction? Nay, it was conceivable that as
Mordecai needed and believed that he had found an active replenishment of
himself, so Deronda might receive from Mordecai's mind the complete ideal shape
of that personal duty and citizenship which lay in his own thought like
sculptured fragments certifying some beauty yearned after but not traceable by
divination.
    As that possibility presented itself in his meditations, he was aware that
it would be called dreamy, and began to defend it. If the influence he imagined
himself submitting to had been that of some honoured professor, some authority
in a seat of learning, some philosopher who had been accepted as a voice of the
age, would a thorough receptiveness towards direction have been ridiculed? Only
by those who hold it a sign of weakness to be obliged for an idea, and prefer to
hint that they have implicitly held in a more correct form whatever others have
stated with a sadly short-coming explicitness. After all, what was there but
vulgarity in taking the fact that Mordecai was a poor Jewish workman, and that
he was to be met perhaps on a sanded floor in the parlour of the Hand and
Banner, as a reason for determining beforehand that there was not some spiritual
force within him that might have a determining effect on a white-handed
gentleman? There is a legend told of the Emperor Domitian, that having heard of
a Jewish family, of the house of David, whence the ruler of the world was to
spring, he sent for its members in alarm, but quickly released them on observing
that they had the hands of work-people - being of just the opposite opinion with
that Rabbi who stood waiting at the gate of Rome in confidence that the Messiah
would be found among the destitute who entered
