fortune from his fathers, having neither social standing nor civil
rights, it slipped gradually out of his hands, and went to support the
schools and hospitals of his foes. Having reached the end of his life,
his deathbed was made miserable; for dying in the faith of his fathers,
he could not be laid to rest beside them, and like a pariah he would be
carried to his grave at night, no more than ten of those near and dear to
him being allowed to follow his coffin.

Lastly, if at any age whatever he should attempt to quit the cruel soil
on which he had no right to be born, to live, or to die, he would be
declared a rebel, his goads would be confiscated, and the lightest
penalty that he had to expect, if he ever fell into the hands of his
enemies, was to row for the rest of his life in the galleys of the king,
chained between a murderer and a forger.

Such a state of things was intolerable: the cries of one man are lost in
space, but the groans of a whole population are like a storm; and this
time, as always, the tempest gathered in the mountains, and the rumblings
of the thunder began to be heard.

First there were texts written by invisible hands on city walls, on the
signposts and cross-roads, on the crosses in the cemeteries: these
warnings, like the 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin' of Belshazzar, even
pursued the persecutors into the midst of their feasts and orgies.

Now it was the threat, "Jesus came not to send peace, but a sword." Then
this consolation, "For where two or three are gathered together in My
name, there am I in the midst of them." Or perhaps it was this appeal
for united action which was soon to become a summons to revolt, "That
which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have