surprise and disgust at the aberrations of Jews and other dissidents whose lives
do not offer a consistent or lovely pattern of their creed; and this evening
Deronda, becoming more conscious that he was falling into unfairness and
ridiculous exaggeration, began to use that corrective comparison: he paid his
thaler too much, without prejudice to his interests in the Hebrew destiny, or
his wish to find the Rabbinische Schule, which he arrived at by sunset, and
entered with a good congregation of men.
    He happened to take his seat in a line with an elderly man from whom he was
distant enough to glance at him more than once as rather a noticeable figure -
his ample white beard and felt hat framing a profile of that fine contour which
may as easily be Italian as Hebrew. He returned Deronda's notice till at last
their eyes met: an undesirable chance with unknown persons, and a reason to
Deronda for not looking again; but he immediately found an open prayer-book
pushed towards him and had to bow his thanks. However, the congregation had
mustered, the reader had mounted to the almemor or platform, and the service
began. Deronda, having looked enough at the German translation of the Hebrew in
the book before him to know that he was chiefly hearing Psalms and Old Testament
passages or phrases, gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted
liturgies which is independent of detailed verbal meaning - like the effect of
an Allegri's Miserere or a Palestrina's Magnificat. The most powerful movement
of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is
a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation
of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of
gladness, a Gloria in excelsis that such Good exists; both the yearning and the
exultation gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form
which has expressed them both, for long generations of struggling fellow-men.
The Hebrew liturgy, like others, has its transitions of litany, lyric,
proclamation, dry statement and blessing; but this evening all were one for
Deronda: the chant of the Chazan's or Reader's grand wide-ranging voice with its
passage from monotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet boys' voices from
the little quire, the devotional swaying of men's bodies backwards and forwards,
the very commonness of the building and shabbiness of the scene where a national
faith, which had penetrated the thinking of half the world, and moulded the
splendid forms of that world's religion, was