It was by little and little that Donna Inez sought rather to undermine
than to storm the mental fortress she hoped to man with spiritual allies;
and, in her frequent conversation with Leila, she was at once perplexed
and astonished by the simple and sublime nature of the belief upon which
she waged war. For whether it was that, in his desire to preserve Leila
as much as possible from contact even with Jews themselves, whose general
character (vitiated by the oppression which engendered meanness, and the
extortion which fostered avarice) Almamen regarded with lofty though
concealed repugnance; or whether it was, that his philosophy did not
interpret the Jewish formula of belief in the same spirit as the herd,--
the religion inculcated in the breast of Leila was different from that
which Inez had ever before encountered amongst her proselytes. It was
less mundane and material--a kind of passionate rather than metaphysical
theism, which invested the great ONE, indeed, with many human sympathies
and attributes, but still left Him the August and awful God of the
Genesis, the Father of a Universe though the individual Protector of a
fallen sect. Her attention had been less directed to whatever appears,
to a superficial gaze, stern and inexorable in the character of the
Hebrew God, and which the religion of Christ so beautifully softened and
so majestically refined, than to those passages in which His love watched
over a chosen people, and His forbearance bore with their transgressions.
Her reason had been worked upon to its belief by that mysterious and
solemn agency, by which--when the whole world beside was bowed to the
worship of innumerable deities, and the adoration of graven images,--in a
small and secluded portion of earth, amongst a people far less civilised
and philosophical than many by which they were surrounded, had been alone
preserved a pure and sublime theism, disdaining a likeness in the things
of heaven or earth. Leila knew little of the more narrow and exclusive
tenets of her brethren; a Jewess in name, she was rather a deist in