THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE INQUISITION IN PORTUGALThe Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal
The king of Portugal was at first perfectly astonished at the pope's despatching a legate to him without any previous announcement to him of his intention. The legate hastily observed that in a concern so urgent as that of establishing the Inquisition on a firm foundation, his holiness could admit of no delays, and that the king might consider himself honored by the holy father's having appointed a legate to be the first person to announce his intention. The king did not venture to reply. The legate on the same day constituted a grand inquisitor, and sent about collectors to receive the tenths; and before the court could obtain answers from Rome to its representations on the subject, the legate had brought two hundred victims to the stake, and collected more than two hundred thousand crowns.
However, the marquis of Villanova, a Spanish nobleman, of whom the legate had borrowed at Seville a very considerable sum upon forged bills, determined, if possible, to repay himself the money with his own hands, instead of going to Lisbon and exposing himself to the intrigues and influence of the swindler there. The legate was at this time making his circuit through the country, and happened very conveniently to be on the borders of Spain. The marquis unexpectedly advanced upon him with fifty men well armed, carried him off prisoner, and conducted him to Madrid.
The whole imposture was speedily discovered at Lisbon; the Council of Madrid condemned the legate Saavedra to be flogged and sent to the galleys for ten years; but the most admirable circumstance was, that Pope Paul IV. confirmed subsequently all that the impostor had established; out of the plenitude of his divine power he rectified all the little irregularities of the various procedures, and rendered sacred what before was merely human. Of what importance the arm which God employs in His sacred service?—"Qu'importe de quel bras Dieu daigne se servir?"
Such was the manner in which the Inquisition became established at Lisbon; and the whole kingdom extolled the wisdom and providence of God on the occasion.
To conclude, the methods of procedure adopted by this tribunal are generally known; it is well known how strongly they are opposed to the false equity and blind reason of all other tribunals in the world. Men are imprisoned on the mere accusation of persons the most infamous; a son may denounce his father, and the wife her husband; the accused is never confronted with the accusers; and the property of the person convicted is confiscated for the benefit of the judges: such at least was the manner of its proceeding down to our own times. Surely in this we must perceive something decidedly divine; for it is absolutely incomprehensible that men should have patiently submitted to this yoke.
At length Count Aranda has obtained the blessings of all Europe by paring the nails and filing the teeth of the monster in Spain; it breathes, however, still.
"Instinctus,impulsus," impulse; but what power impels us?
All feeling is instinct. A secret conformity of our organs to their respective objects forms our instinct. It is solely by instinct that we perform numberless involuntary movements, just as it is by instinct that we possess curiosity, that we run after novelty, that menaces terrify us, that contempt irritates us, that an air of submission appeases us, and that tears soften us.
We are governed by instinct, as well as cats and goats; this is one further circumstance in which we resemble the mere animal tribes—a resemblance as incontestable as that of our blood, our necessities, and the various functions of our bodies.
Our instinct is never so shrewd and skilful as theirs, and does not even approach it; a calf and a lamb, as soon as they are born, rush to the fountain of their mother's milk; but unless the mother of the infant clasped it in her arms, and folded it to her bosom, it would inevitably perish.
No woman in a state of pregnancy was ever invincibly impelled to prepare for her infant a convenient wicker cradle, as the wren with its bill and claws prepares a nest for her offspring. But the power of reflection which we possess, in conjunction with two industrious hands presented to us by nature, raises us to an equality with the instinct of animals, and in the course of time places us infinitely above them, both in respect to good and evil—a proposition condemned by the members of the ancient parliament and by the Sorbonne, natural philosophers of distinguished eminence, and who, it is well known, have admirably promoted the perfection of the arts.
Our instinct, in the first place, impels us to beat our brother when he vexes us, if we are roused into a passion with him and feel that we are stronger than he is. Afterwards, our sublime reason leads us on to the invention of arrows, swords, pikes, and at length muskets, to kill our neighbors with.
Instinct alone urges us all tomakelove—"Amor omnibus idem;" but Virgil, Tibullus, and Ovidsingit. It is from instinct alone that a young artisan stands gazing with respect and admiration before the superfine gilt coach of a commissioner of taxes. Reason comes to the assistance of the young artisan; he is made a collector; he becomes polished; he embezzles; he rises to be a great man in his turn, and dazzles the eyes of his former comrades as he lolls at ease in his own carriage, more profusely gilded than that which originally excited his admiration and ambition.
What is this instinct which governs the whole animal kingdom, and which in us is strengthened by reason or repressed by habit? Is it "divinæ particula auræ?" Yes, undoubtedly it is something divine; for everything is so. Everything is the incomprehensible effect of an incomprehensible cause. Everything is swayed, is impelled by nature. We reason about everything, and originate nothing.
We shall teach men nothing, when we tell them that everything we do is done from interest. What! it will be said, is it from motives of interest that the wretched fakir remains stark naked under the burning sun, loaded with chains, dying with hunger, half devoured by vermin, and devouring them in his turn? Yes, most undoubtedly it is; as we have stated elsewhere, he depends upon ascending to the eighteenth heaven, and looks with an eye of pity on the man who will be admitted only into the ninth.
The interest of the Malabar widow, who burns herself with the corpse of her husband, is to recover him in another world, and be there more happy even than the fakir. For, together with their metempsychosis, the Indians have another world; they resemble ourselves; their system admits of contradictions.
Were you ever acquainted with any king or republic that made either war or peace, that issued decrees, or entered into conventions, from any other motive than that of interest?
With respect to the interest of money, consult, in the great "Encyclopædia," the article of M. d'Alembert, on "Calculation," and that of M. Boucher d'Argis, on "Jurisprudence." We will venture to add a few reflections.
1. Are gold and silver merchandise? Yes; the author of the "Spirit of Laws" does not think so when he says: "Money, which is the price of commodities, is hired and not bought."
It is both lent and bought. I buy gold with silver, and silver with gold; and their price fluctuates in all commercial countries from day to day.
The law of Holland requires bills of exchange to be paid in the silver coin of the country, and not in gold, if the creditor demands it. Then I buy silver money, and I pay for it in gold, or in cloth, corn, or diamonds.
I am in want of money, corn, or diamonds, for the space of a year; the corn, money, or diamond merchant says—I could, for this year, sell my money, corn, or diamonds to advantage. Let us estimate at four, five, or six per cent., according to the usage of the country, what I should lose by letting you have it. You shall, for instance, return me at the end of the year, twenty-one carats of diamonds for the twenty which I now lend you; twenty-one sacks of corn for the twenty; twenty-one thousand crowns for twenty thousand crowns. Such is interest. It is established among all nations by the law of nature. The maximum or highest rate of interest depends, in every country, on its own particular law. In Rome money is lent on pledges at two and a half per cent., according to law, and the pledges are sold, if the money be not paid at the appointed time. I do not lend upon pledges, and I require only the interest customary in Holland. If I were in China, I should ask of you the customary interest at Macao and Canton.
2. While the parties were proceeding with this bargain at Amsterdam, it happened that there arrived from St. Magliore, a Jansenist (and the fact is perfectly true, he was called the Abbé des Issarts); this Jansenist says to the Dutch merchant, "Take care what you are about; you are absolutely incurring damnation; money must not produce money, 'nummus nummum non parit.' No one is allowed to receive interest for his money but when he is willing to sink the principal. The way to be saved is to make a contract with the gentleman; and for twenty thousand crowns which you are never to have returned to you, you and your heirs will receive a thousand crowns per annum to all eternity."
"You jest," replies the Dutchman; "you are in this very case proposing to me a usury that is absolutely of the nature of an infinite series. I should (that is, myself and heirs would) in that case receive back my capital at the end of twenty years, the double of it in forty, the four-fold of it in eighty; this you see would be just an infinite series. I cannot, besides, lend for more than twelve months, and I am contented with a thousand crowns as a remuneration."
THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS.—I am grieved for your Dutch soul; God forbade the Jews to lend at interest, and you are well aware that a citizen of Amsterdam should punctually obey the laws of commerce given in a wilderness to runaway vagrants who had no commerce.
THE DUTCHMAN.—That is clear; all the world ought to be Jews; but it seems to me, that the law permitted the Hebrew horde to gain as much by usury as they could from foreigners, and that, in consequence of this permission, they managed their affairs in the sequel remarkably well. Besides, the prohibition against one Jew's taking interest from another must necessarily have become obsolete, since our Lord Jesus, when preaching at Jerusalem, expressly said that interest was in his time one hundred per cent.; for in the parable of the talents he says, that the servant who had received five talents gained five others in Jerusalem by them; that he who had two gained two by them; and that the third who had only one, and did not turn that to any account, was shut up in a dungeon by his master, for not laying it out with the money-changers. But these money-changers were Jews; it was therefore between Jews that usury was practised at Jerusalem; therefore this parable, drawn from the circumstances and manners of the times, decidedly indicates that usury or interest was at the rate of a hundred per cent. Read the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew; he was conversant with the subject; he had been a commissioner of taxes in Galilee. Let me finish my argument with this gentleman; and do not make me lose both my money and my time.
THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS.—All that you say is very good and very fine; but the Sorbonne has decided that lending money on interest is a mortal sin.
THE DUTCHMAN.—You must be laughing at me, my good friend, when you cite the Sorbonne as an authority to a merchant of Amsterdam. There is not a single individual among those wrangling railers themselves who does not obtain, whenever he can, five or six per cent, for his money by purchasing revenue bills, India bonds, assignments, and Canada bills. The clergy of France, as a corporate body, borrow at interest. In many of the provinces of France, it is the custom to stipulate for interest with the principal. Besides, the university of Oxford and that of Salamanca have decided against the Sorbonne. I acquired this information in the course of my travels; and thus we have authority against authority. Once more, I must beg you to interrupt me no longer.
THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS.—The wicked, sir, are never at a loss for reasons. You are, I repeat, absolutely destroying yourself, for the Abbé de St. Cyran, who has not performed any miracles, and the Abbé Paris, who performed some in St. Médard....
3. Before the abbé had finished his speech, the merchant drove him out of his counting-house; and after having legally lent his money, to the last penny, went to represent the conversation between himself and the abbé, to the magistrates, who forbade the Jansenists from propagating a doctrine so pernicious to commerce.
"Gentlemen," said the chief bailiff, "give us of efficacious grace as much as you please, of predestination as much as you please, and of communion as little as you please; on these points you are masters; but take care not to meddle with the laws of commerce."
Read the article on "Intolerance" in the great "Encyclopædia." Read the treatise on "Toleration" composed on occasion of the dreadful assassination of John Calas, a citizen of Toulouse; and if, after that, you allow of persecution in matters of religion, compare yourself at once to Ravaillac. Ravaillac, you know, was highly intolerant. The following is the substance of all the discourses ever delivered by the intolerant:
You monster; you will be burned to all eternity in the other world, and whom I will myself burn as soon as ever I can in this, you really have the insolence to read de Thou and Bayle, who have been put into the index of prohibited authors at Rome! When I was preaching to you in the name of God, how Samson had killed a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, your head, still harder than the arsenal from which Samson obtained his arms, showed me by a slight movement from left to right that you believed nothing of what I said. And when I stated that the devil Asmodeus, who out of jealousy twisted the necks of the seven husbands of Sarah among the Medes, was put in chains in upper Egypt, I saw a small contraction of your lips, in Latin calledcachinnus(a grin) which plainly indicated to me that in the bottom of your soul you held the history of Asmodeus in derision.
And as for you, Isaac Newton; Frederick the Great, king of Prussia and elector of Brandenburg; John Locke; Catherine, empress of Russia, victorious over the Ottomans; John Milton; the beneficent sovereign of Denmark; Shakespeare; the wise king of Sweden; Leibnitz; the august house of Brunswick; Tillotson; the emperor of China; the Parliament of England; the Council of the great Mogul; in short, all you who do not believe one word which I have taught in my courses on divinity, I declare to you, that I regard you all as pagans and publicans, as, in order to engrave it on your unimpressible brains, I have often told you before. You are a set of callous miscreants; you will all go to gehenna, where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched; for I am right, and you are all wrong; and I have grace, and you have none. I confess three devotees in my neighborhood, while you do not confess a single one; I have executed the mandates of bishops, which has never been the case with you; I have abused philosophers in the language of the fish-market, while you have protected, imitated, or equalled them; I have composed pious defamatory libels, stuffed with infamous calumnies, and you have never so much as read them. I say mass every day in Latin for fourteen sous, and you are never even so much as present at it, any more than Cicero, Cato, Pompey, Cæsar, Horace, or Virgil, were ever present at it—consequently you deserve each of you to have your right hand cut off, your tongue cut out, to be put to the torture, and at last burned at a slow fire; for God is merciful.
Such, without the slightest abatement, are the maxims of the intolerant, and the sum and substance of all their books. How delightful to live with such amiable people!
"Was there ever a time when the globe was entirely inundated? It is physically impossible.
It is possible that the sea may successively have covered every land, one part after another; and even this can only have happened by very slow gradation, and in a prodigious number of centuries. In the course of five hundred years the sea has retired from Aigues-Mortes, Fréjus, and Ravenna, which were considerable ports, and left about two leagues of land dry. According to the ratio of such progression, it is clear that it would require two million and two hundred and fifty thousand years to produce the same effect through the whole circuit of the globe. It is a somewhat remarkable circumstance that this period of time nearly falls in with that which the axis of the earth would require to be raised, so as to coincide with the equator; a change extremely probable, which began to be considered so only about fifty years since, and which could not be completed in a shorter period of time than two million and three hundred thousand years.
The beds or strata of shells, which have been discovered at the distance of some leagues from the sea, are an incontestable evidence that it has gradually deposited these marine productions on tracts which were formerly shores of the ocean; but that the water should have ever covered the whole globe at once is an absurd chimera in physics, demonstrated to be impossible by the laws of gravitation, by the laws of fluids, and by the insufficient quantity of water for the purpose. We do not, however, by these observations, at all mean to impeach the truth of the universal deluge, related in the Pentateuch; on the contrary, that is a miracle which it is our duty to believe; it is a miracle, and therefore could not have been accomplished by the laws of nature.
All is miracle in the history of the deluge—a miracle, that forty days of rain should have inundated the four quarters of the world, and have raised the water to the height of fifteen cubits above the tops of the loftiest mountains; a miracle, that there should have been cataracts, floodgates, and openings in heaven; a miracle, that all sorts of animals should have been collected in the ark from all parts of the world; a miracle that Noah found the means of feeding them for a period of ten months; a miracle that all the animals with all their provisions could have been included and retained in the ark; a miracle, that the greater part of them did not die; a miracle, that after quitting the ark, they found food enough to maintain them; and a further miracle, but of a different kind, that a person, by the name of Lepelletier, thought himself capable of explaining how all the animals could be contained and fed in Noah's ark naturally, that is, without a miracle.
But the history of the deluge being that of the most miraculous event of which the world ever heard, it must be the height of folly and madness to attempt an explanation of it: it is one of the mysteries which are believed by faith; and faith consists in believing that which reason does not believe—which is only another miracle.
The history of the universal deluge, therefore, is like that of the tower of Babel, of Balaam's ass, of the falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of trumpets, of waters turned into blood, of the passage of the Red Sea, and of the whole of the prodigies which God condescended to perform in favor of his chosen people—depths unfathomable to the human understanding.
Jehovah, the ancient name of God. No people ever pronounced it "Geova," as the French do; they pronounced it "Iëvo"; you find it so written in Sanchoniathon, cited by Eusebius, Prep., book x.; in Diodorus, book ii.; and in Macrobius, Sat., book i. All nations have pronounced itieand notg. This sacred name was formed out of the vowelsi,e,o,u, in the east. Some pronouncedïe,oh, with an aspirate,i,e o,va. The word was always to be constituted of four letters, although we have here used five, for want of power to express these four characters.
We have already observed that, according to Clement of Alexandria, by seizing on the correct pronunciation of this name a person had it in his power to produce the death of any man. Clement gives an instance of it.
Long before the time of Moses, Seth had pronounced the name of "Jehovah," as is related in the fourth chapter of Genesis; and, according to the Hebrew, Seth was even called "Jehovah." Abraham swore to the king of Sodom by Jehovah, chap. xiv. 22.
From the word "Jehovah," the Latins derived "Jove," "Jovis," "Jovispeter," "Jupiter." In the bush, the Almighty says to Moses, "My name is Jehovah." In the orders which he gave Him for the court of Pharaoh, he says to him: "I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as the mighty God, only by my name, Adonai,' I was not known to them, and I made a covenant with them."
The Jews did not for a long time pronounce this name. It was common to the Phœnicians and Egyptians. It signified, that which is; and hence, probably, is derived the inscription of Isis: "I am all that is."
It is evident from the text of the Book of Judges that Jephthah promised to sacrifice the first person that should come out of his house to congratulate him on his victory over the Ammonites. His only daughter presented herself before him for that purpose; he tore his garments and immolated her, after having promised her to go and deplore in the recesses of the mountains the calamity of her dying a virgin. The daughters of Israel long continued to celebrate this painful event, and devoted four days in the year to lamentation for the daughter of Jephthah.
In whatever period this history was written, whether it was imitated from the Greek history of Agamemnon and Idomeneus, or was the model from which that history was taken; whether it might be anterior or posterior to similar narratives in Assyrian history is not the point I am now examining. I keep strictly to the text. Jephthah vowed to make his daughter a burnt offering, and fulfilled his vow.
It was expressly commanded by the Jewish law to sacrifice men devoted to the Lord: "Every man that shall be devoted shall not be redeemed, but shall be put to death without remission." The Vulgate translates it: "He shall not be redeemed, but shall die the death."
It was in virtue of this law that Samuel hewed in pieces King Agag, whom, as we have already seen, Saul had pardoned. In fact, it was for sparing Agag that Saul was rebuked by the Lord, and lost his kingdom.
Thus, then, we perceive sacrifices of human blood clearly established; there is no point of history more incontestable: we can only judge of a nation by its own archives, and by what it relates concerning itself.
There are, then, it seems, persons to be found who hesitate at nothing, who falsify a passage of Scripture as intrepidly as if they were quoting its very words, and who hope to deceive mankind by their falsehoods, knowing them perfectly to be such. If such daring impostors are to be found now, we cannot help supposing, that before the invention of printing, which affords such facility, and almost certainty of detection, there existed a hundred times as many.
One of the most impudent falsifiers who have lately appeared, is the author of an infamous libel entitled "The Anti-Philosophic Dictionary," which truly deserves its title. But my readers will say, "Do not be so irritated; what is it to you that a contemptible book has been published?" Gentlemen, it is to the subject of Jephthah, to the subject of human victims, of the blood of men sacrificed to God, that I am now desirous of drawing your attention!
The author, whoever he may be, translates the thirty-ninth verse of the first chapter of the history of Jephthah as follows: "She returned to the house of her father, who fulfilled the consecration which he had promised by his vow, and his daughter remained in the state of virginity."
Yes, falsifier of the Bible, I am irritated at it, I acknowledge; but you have lied to the holy spirit; which you ought to know is a sin which is never pardoned.
The passage in the Vulgate is as follows:
"Et reversa est ad patrem suum, et fecit ei sicut voverat quæ ignorabat virum. Exinde mos increbruit in Israel et consuetudo servata est, ut post anni circulum conveniant in unum filiæ Israel, et plangant filiam Jephte Galaaditæ, diebus quatuor."
"And she returned to her father and he did to her as he had vowed, to her who had never known man; and hence came the usage, and the custom is still observed, that the daughters of Israel assemble every year to lament the daughter of Jephthah for four days."
You will just have the goodness, Mr. Anti-philosopher, to tell us, whether four days of lamentation every year have been devoted to weeping the fate of a young woman because she was consecrated?
Whether any nuns (religieuses) were ever solemnly appointed among a people who considered virginity an opprobrium?
And also, what is the natural meaning of the phrase, he did to her as he had vowed—"Fecit ei sicut voverat?"
What had Jephthah vowed? What had he promised by an oath to perform? To kill his daughter; to offer her up as a burnt offering—and he did kill her.
Read Calmet's dissertation on the rashness of Jephthah's vow and its fulfilment; read the law which he cites, that terrible law of Leviticus, in the twenty-seventh chapter, which commands that all which shall be devoted to the Lord shall not be ransomed, but shall die the death: "Non redimetur, sed morte morletur."
Observe the multitude of examples by which this most astonishing truth is attested. Look at the Amalekites and Canaanites; look at the king of Arvad and all his family subjected to the law of devotion; look at the priest Samuel slaying King Agag with his own hands, and cutting him into pieces as a butcher cuts up an ox in his slaughter-house. After considering all this, go and corrupt, falsify, or deny holy Scripture, in order to maintain your paradox; and insult those who revere the Scripture, however astonishing and confounding they may find it. Give the lie direct to the historian Josephus, who transcribes the narrative in question, and positively asserts that Jephthah immolated his daughter. Pile revilings upon falsehoods, and calumny upon ignorance; sages will smile at your impotence; and sages, thank God, are at present neither few nor weak. Oh, that you could but see the sovereign contempt with which they look down upon the Rouths, when they corrupt the holy Scripture, and when they boast of having disputed with the president Montesquieu in his last hour, and convinced him that he ought to think exactly like the Jesuits!
The Jesuits have been so much a subject of discourse and discussion that, after having engaged the attention of Europe for a period of two hundred years, they at last begin to weary and disgust it, whether they write themselves, or whether any one else writes for or against that singular society; in which it must be confessed there have been found, and are to be found still, individuals of very extraordinary merit.
They have been reproached, in the six thousand volumes that have been written against them, with their lax morality, which has not, however, been more lax than that of the Capuchins; and with their doctrine relating to the safety of the person of kings; a doctrine which after all is not to be compared with the horn-handled knife of James Clement; nor with the prepared host, the sprinkled wafer, which so well answered the purpose of Ange de Montepulciano, another Jacobin, and which poisoned the emperor Henry VII.
It is not versatile grace which has been their ruin, nor the fraudulent bankruptcy of the reverend Father Lavalette, prefect of the apostolic missions. A whole order has not been expelled from France and Spain and the two Sicilies, because that order contained a single bankrupt. Nor was it affected by the odious deviations of the Jesuit Guyot-Desfontaines, or the Jesuit Fréron, or the reverend father Marsy, so injurious, in the latter instance, to the youthful and high-born victim. The public refused to attend these Greek and Latin imitations of Anacreon and Horace.
What is it then that was their ruin?—pride, What, it may be asked by some, were the Jesuits prouder than any other monks? Yes; and so much so that they procured alettre de cachetagainst an ecclesiastic for calling them monks. One member of the society, called Croust, more brutal than the rest, a brother of the confessor of the second dauphiness, was absolutely, in my presence, going to beat the son of M. de Guyot, afterwards king's advocate (prêteur-royal) at Strasburg, merely for saying he would go to see him in his convent.
It is perfectly incredible with what contempt they considered every university where they had not been educated, every book which they had not written, every ecclesiastic who was not "a man of quality." Of this I have myself, times without number, been a witness. They express themselves in the following language, in their libel entitled "It is Time to Speak Out": "Should we condescend even to speak to a magistrate who says the Jesuits are proud and ought to be humbled?" They were so proud that they would not suffer any one to blame their pride!
Whence did this hateful pride originate? From Father Guinard's having been hanged? which is literally true.
It must be remarked that after the execution of that Jesuit under Henry IV., and after the banishment of the society from the kingdom, they were recalled only on the indispensable condition that one Jesuit should always reside at court, who should be responsible for all the rest. Coton was the person who thus became a hostage at the court of Henry IV.; and that excellent monarch, who was not without his little stratagems of policy, thought to conciliate the pope by making a hostage of his confessor.
From that moment every brother of the order seemed to feel as if he had been raised to be king's confessor. This place of first spiritual physician became a department of the administration under Louis XIII., and moreso still under Louis XIV. The brother Vadblé, valet de chambre of Father La Chaise, granted his protection to the bishops of France; and Father Letellier ruled with a sceptre of iron those who were very well disposed to be so ruled. It was impossible that the greater part of the Jesuits should not be puffed up by the consequence and power to which these two members of their society had been raised, and that they should not become as insolent as the lackeys of M. Louvois. There have been among them, certainly, men of knowledge, eloquence, and genius; these possessed some modesty, but those who had only mediocrity of talent or acquirement were tainted with that pride which generally attaches to mediocrity and to the pedantry of a college.
From the time of Father Garasse almost all their polemical works have been pervaded with an indecent and scornful arrogance which has roused the indignation of all Europe. This arrogance frequently sank into the most pitiful meanness; so that they discovered the extraordinary secret of being objects at once of envy and contempt. Observe, for example, how they expressed themselves of the celebrated Pasquier, advocate-general of the chamber of accounts:
"Pasquier is a mere porter, a Parisian varlet, a second-rate showman and jester, a journeyman retailer of ballads and old stories, a contemptible hireling, only fit to be a lackey's valet, a scrub, a disgusting ragamuffin, strongly suspected of heresy, and either heretical or much worse, a libidinous and filthy satyr, a master-fool by nature, in sharp, in flat, and throughout the whole gamut, a three-shod fool, a fool double-dyed, a fool in grain, a fool in every sort of folly."
They afterwards polished their style; but pride, by becoming less gross, only became the more revolting.
Everything is pardoned except pride; and this accounts for the fact that all the parliaments in the kingdom, the members of which had the greater part of them been disciples of the Jesuits, seized the first opportunity of effecting their annihilation; and the whole land rejoiced in their downfall.
So deeply was the spirit of pride rooted in them that it manifested itself with the most indecent rage, even while they were held down to the earth by the hand of justice, and their final sentence yet remained to be pronounced. We need only read the celebrated memorial already mentioned, entitled "It is Time to Speak Out," printed at Avignon in 1763, under the assumed name of Anvers. It begins with an ironical petition to the persons holding the court of parliament. It addresses them with as much superiority and contempt as could be shown in reprimanding a proctor's clerk. The illustrious M. de Montclar, procureur-général, the oracle of the Parliament of Provence, is continually treated as "M. Ripert," and rebuked with as much consequence and authority as a mutinous and ignorant scholar by a professor in his chair. They pushed their audacity so far as to say that M. de Montclar "blasphemed" in giving an account of the institution of the Jesuits.
In their memorial, entitled "All Shall be Told," they insult still more daringly the Parliament of Metz, and always in the style of arrogance and dictation derived from the schools.
They have retained this pride even in the very ashes to which France and Spain have now reduced them. From the bottom of those ashes the serpent, scotched as it has been, has again raised its hostile head. We have seen a contemptible creature, of the name of Nonnotte, set himself up for a critic on his masters; and, although possessing merely talent enough for preaching to a mob in the church-yard, discoursing with all the ease of impudence about things of which he has not the slightest notion. Another insolent member of the society, called Patouillet, dared, in the bishop's mandates, to insult respectable citizens and officers of the king's household, whose very lackeys would not have permitted him to speak to them.
One of the things on which they most prided themselves, was introducing themselves into the houses of the great in their last illness, as ambassadors of God, to open to them the gates of heaven, without their previously passing through purgatory. Under Louis XIV. it was considered as having a bad aspect, it was unfashionable and discreditable, to die without having passed through the hands of a Jesuit; and the wretch, immediately after the fatal scene had closed, would go and boast to his devotees that he had just been converting a duke and peer, who, without his protection, would have been inevitably damned.
The dying man might say: "By what right, you college excrement, do you intrude yourself on me in my dying moments? Was I ever seen to go to your cells when any of you had the fistula or gangrene, and were about to return your gross and unwieldy bodies to the earth? Has God granted your soul any rights over mine? Do I require a preceptor at the age of seventy? Do you carry the keys of Paradise at your girdle? You dare to call yourself an ambassador of God; show me your patent and if you have none, let me die in peace. No Benedictine, Chartreux, or Premonstrant, comes to disturb my dying moments; they have no wish to erect a trophy to their pride upon the bed of our last agony; they remain peacefully in their cells; do you rest quietly in yours; there can be nothing in common between you and me."
A comic circumstance occurred on a truly mournful occasion, when an English Jesuit, of the name of Routh, eagerly strove to possess himself of the last hour of the great Montesquieu. "He came," he said, "to bring back that virtuous soul to religion;" as if Montesquieu had not known what religion was better than a Routh; as if it had been the will of God that Montesquieu should think like a Routh! He was driven out of the chamber, and went all over Paris, exclaiming, "I have converted that celebrated man; I prevailed upon him to throw his 'Persian Letters' and his 'Spirit of Laws' into the fire." Care was taken to print the narrative of the conversion of President Montesquieu by the reverend father Routh in the libel entitled "The Anti-Philosophic Dictionary."
Another subject of pride and ambition with the Jesuits was making missions to various cities, just as if they had been among Indians or Japanese. They would oblige the whole magistracy to attend them in the streets; a cross was borne before them, planted in the principal public places; they dispossessed the resident clergy; they became complete masters of the city. A Jesuit of the name of Aubert performed one of these missions to Colmar, and compelled the advocate-general of the sovereign council to burn at his feet his copy of "Bayle," which had cost him no less than fifty crowns. For my own part, I acknowledge that I would rather have burned brother Aubert himself. Judge how the pride of this Aubert must have swelled with this sacrifice as he boasted of it to his comrades at night, and as he exultingly wrote the account of it to his general.
O monks, monks! be modest, as I have already advised you; be moderate, if you wish to avoid the calamities impending over you.
You order me to draw you a faithful picture of the spirit of the Jews, and of their history, and—without entering into the ineffable ways of Providence, which are not our ways—you seek in the manners of this people the source of the events which that Providence prepared.
It is certain that the Jewish nation is the most singular that the world has ever seen; and although, in a political view, the most contemptible of all, yet in the eyes of a philosopher, it is, on various accounts, worthy consideration.
The Guebers, the Banians, and the Jews, are the only nations which exist dispersed, having no alliance with any people, are perpetuated among foreign nations, and continue apart from the rest of the world.
The Guebers were once infinitely more considerable than the Jews, for they are castes of the Persians, who had the Jews under their dominion; but they are now scattered over but one part of the East.
The Banians, who are descended from the ancient people among whom Pythagoras acquired his philosophy, exist only in India and Persia; but the Jews are dispersed over the whole face of the earth and if they were assembled, would compose a nation much more numerous than it ever was in the short time that they were masters of Palestine. Almost every people who have written the history of their origin, have chosen to set it off by prodigies; with them all has been miracle; their oracles have predicted nothing but conquest; and such of them as have really become conquerors have had no difficulty in believing these ancient oracles which were verified by the event. The Jews are distinguished among the nations by this—that their oracles are the only true ones, of which we are not permitted to doubt. These oracles, which they understand only in the literal sense, have a hundred times foretold to them that they should be masters of the world; yet they have never possessed anything more than a small corner of land, and that only for a small number of years, and they have not now so much as a village of their own. They must, then, believe, and they do believe, that their predictions will one day be fulfilled, and that they shall have the empire of the earth.
Among the Mussulmans and the Christians they are the lowest of all nations, but they think themselves the highest. This pride in their abasement is justified by an unanswerable reason—viz., that they are in reality the fathers of both Christians and Mussulmans. The Christian and the Mussulman religion acknowledge the Jewish as their parent; and, by a singular contradiction, they at once hold this parent in reverence and in abhorrence.
It were foreign to our present purpose to repeat that continued succession of prodigies which astonishes the imagination and exercises the faith. We have here to do only with events purely historical, wholly apart from the divine concurrence and the miracles which God, for so long a time, vouchsafed to work in this people's favor.
First, we find in Egypt a family of seventy persons producing, at the end of two hundred and fifteen years, a nation counting six hundred thousand fighting men; which makes, with the women, the children and the old men, upward of two millions of souls. There is no example upon earth of so prodigious an increase of population; this people, having come out of Egypt, stayed forty years in the deserts of Stony Arabia, and in that frightful country the people much diminished.
What remained of this nation advanced a little northward in those deserts. It appears that they had the same principles which the tribes of Stony and Desert Arabia have since had, of butchering without mercy the inhabitants of little towns over whom they had the advantage, and reserving only the young women. The interests of population have ever been the principal object of both. We find that when the Arabs had conquered Spain, they imposed tributes of marriageable girls; and at this day the Arabs of the desert make no treaty without stipulating for some girls and a few presents.
The Jews arrived in a sandy, mountainous country, where there were a few towns, inhabited by a little people called the Midianites. In one Midianite camp, alone, they took six hundred and seventy-five thousand sheep, seventy-two thousand oxen, sixty-one thousand asses, and thirty-two thousand virgins. All the men, all the wives, and all the male children, were massacred; the girls and the booty were divided between the people and the sacrificers.
They then took, in the same country, the town of Jericho; but having devoted the inhabitants of that place to the anathema, they massacred them all, including the virgins, pardoning none but Rahab, a courtesan, who had aided them in surprising the town.
The learned have agitated the question whether the Jews, like so many other nations, really sacrificed men to the Divinity. This is a dispute on words; those, whom the people consecrated to the anathema were not put to death on an altar, with religious rites; but they were not the less immolated, without its being permitted to pardon any one of them. Leviticus (xxvii., 29) expressly forbids the redeeming of those who shall have been devoted. Its words are, "They shall surely be put to death." By virtue of this law it was that Jephthah devoted and killed his daughter, that Saul would have killed his son, and that the prophet Samuel cut in pieces King Agag, Saul's prisoner. It is quite certain that God is the master of the lives of men, and that it is not for us to examine His laws. We ought to limit ourselves to believing these things, and reverencing in silence the designs of God, who permitted them.
It is also asked what right had strangers like the Jews to the land of Canaan? The answer is, that they had what God gave them.
No sooner had they taken Jericho and Lais than they had a civil war among themselves, in which the tribe of Benjamin was almost wholly exterminated—men, women, and children; leaving only six hundred males. The people, unwilling that one of the tribes should be annihilated, bethought themselves of sacking the whole city of the tribe of Manasseh, killing all the men, old and young, all the children, all the married women, all the widows, and taking six hundred virgins, whom they gave to the six hundred survivors of the tribe of Benjamin, to restore that tribe, in order that the number of their twelve tribes might still be complete.
Meanwhile, the Phœnicians, a powerful people settled in the coasts from time immemorial, being alarmed at the depredations and cruelties of these newcomers, frequently chastised them; the neighboring princes united against them; and they were seven times reduced to slavery, for more than two hundred years.
At last they made themselves a king, whom they elected by lot. This king could not be very mighty; for in the first battle which the Jews fought under him, against their masters, the Philistines, they had, in the whole army, but one sword and one lance, and not one weapon of steel. But David, their second king, made war with advantage. He took the city of Salem, afterwards so celebrated under the name of Jerusalem, and then the Jews began to make some figure on the borders of Syria. Their government and their religion took a more august form. Hitherto they had not the means of raising a temple, though every neighboring nation had one or more. Solomon built a superb one, and reigned over this people about forty years.
Not only were the days of Solomon the most flourishing days of the Jews, but all the kings upon earth could not exhibit a treasure approaching Solomon's. His father, David, whose predecessor had not even iron, left to Solomon twenty-five thousand six hundred and forty-eight millions of French livres in ready money. His fleets, which went to Ophir, brought him sixty-eight millions per annum in pure gold, without reckoning the silver and jewels. He had forty thousand stables, and the same number of coach-houses, twelve thousand stables for his cavalry, seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines. Yet he had neither wood nor workmen for building his palace and the temple; he borrowed them of Hiram, king of Tyre, who also furnished gold; and Solomon gave Hiram twenty towns in payment. The commentators have acknowledged that these things need explanation, and have suspected some literal error in the copyist, who alone can have been mistaken.
On the death of Solomon, a division took place among the twelve tribes composing the nation. The kingdom was torn asunder, and separated into two small provinces, one of which was called Judah, the other Israel—nine tribes and a half composing the Israelitish province, and only two and a half that of Judah. Then there was between these two small peoples a hatred, the more implacable as they were kinsmen and neighbors, and as they had different religions; for at Sichem and at Samaria they worshipped "Baal"—giving to God a Sidonian name; while at Jerusalem they worshipped "Adonai." At Sichem were consecrated two calves; at Jerusalem, two cherubim—which were two winged animals with double heads, placed in the sanctuary. So, each faction having its kings, its gods, its worship, and its prophets, they made a bloody war upon each other.
"While this war was carried on, the kings of Assyria, who conquered the greater part of Asia, fell upon the Jews; as an eagle pounces upon two lizards while they are fighting. The nine and a half tribes of Samaria and Sichem were carried off and dispersed forever; nor has it been precisely known to what places they were led into slavery.
It is but twenty leagues from the town of Samaria to Jerusalem, and their territories joined each other; so that when one of these towns was enslaved by powerful conquerors, the other could not long hold out. Jerusalem was sacked several times; it was tributary to kings Hazael and Razin, enslaved under Tiglath-Pileser, three times taken by Nebuchodonosor, or Nebuchadnezzar, and at last destroyed. Zedekiah, who had been set up as king or governor by this conqueror, was led, with his whole people, into captivity in Babylonia; so that the only Jews left in Palestine were a few enslaved peasants, to sow the ground.
As for the little country of Samaria and Sichem, more fertile than that of Jerusalem, it was re-peopled by foreign colonies, sent there by Assyrian kings, who took the name of Samaritans.
The two and a half tribes that were slaves in Babylonia and the neighboring towns for seventy years, had time to adopt the usages of their masters, and enriched their own tongue by mixing with it the Chaldæan; this is incontestable. The historian Josephus tells us that he wrote first in Chaldæan, which is the language of his country. It appears that the Jews acquired but little of the science of the Magi; they turned brokers, money-changers, and old-clothes men; by which they made themselves necessary, as they still do, and grew rich.
Their gains enabled them to obtain, under Cyrus, the liberty of rebuilding Jerusalem; but when they were to return into their own country, those who had grown rich at Babylon, would not quit so fine a country for the mountains of Cœlesyria, nor the fruitful banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris, for the torrent of Kedron. Only the meanest part of the nation returned with Zorobabel. The Jews of Babylon contributed only their alms to the rebuilding of the city and the temple; nor was the collection a large one; for Esdras relates that no more than seventy thousand crowns could be raised for the erection of this temple, which was to be that of all the earth.
The Jews still remained subject to the Persians; they were likewise subject to Alexander; and when that great man, the most excusable of all conquerors, had, in the early years of his victorious career, begun to raise Alexandria, and make it the centre of the commerce of the world, the Jews flocked there to exercise their trade of brokers; and there it was that their rabbis at length learned something of the sciences of the Greeks. The Greek tongue became absolutely necessary to all trading Jews.
After Alexander's death, this people continued subject in Jerusalem to the kings of Syria, and in Alexandria to the kings of Egypt; and when these kings were at war, this people always shared the fate of their subjects, and belonged to the conqueror.
From the time of their captivity at Babylon, the Jews never had particular governors taking the title of king. The pontiffs had the internal administration, and these pontiffs were appointed by their masters; they sometimes paid very high for this dignity, as the Greek patriarch at Constantinople pays for his at present.
Under Antiochus Epiphanes they revolted; the city was once more pillaged, and the walls demolished. After a succession of similar disasters, they at length obtained, for the first time, about a hundred and fifty years before the Christian era, permission to coin money, which permission was granted them by Antiochus Sidetes. They then had chiefs, who took the name of kings, and even wore a diadem. Antigonus was the first who was decorated with this ornament, which, without the power, confers but little honor.
At that time the Romans were beginning to become formidable to the kings of Syria, masters of the Jews; and the latter gained over the Roman senate by presents and acts of submission. It seemed that the wars in Asia Minor would, for a time at least, give some relief to this unfortunate people; but Jerusalem no sooner enjoyed some shadow of liberty than it was torn by civil wars, which rendered its condition under its phantoms of kings much more pitiable than it had ever been in so long and various a succession of bondages.
In their intestine troubles, they made the Romans their judges. Already most of the kingdoms of Asia Minor, Southern Africa, and three-fourths of Europe, acknowledged the Romans as their arbiters and masters.
Pompey came into Syria to judge the nation and to depose several petty tyrants. Being deceived by Aristobulus, who disputed the royalty of Jerusalem, he avenged himself upon him and his party. He took the city; had some of the seditious, either priests or Pharisees, crucified; and not long after, condemned Aristobulus, king of the Jews, to execution.
The Jews, ever unfortunate, ever enslaved, and ever revolting, again brought upon them the Roman arms. Crassus and Cassius punished them; and Metellus Scipio had a son of King Aristobulus, named Alexander, the author of all the troubles, crucified.
Under the great Cæsar, they were entirely subject and peaceable. Herod, famed among them and among us, for a long time was merely tetrarch, but obtained from Antony the crown of Judæa, for which he paid dearly; but Jerusalem would not recognize this new king, because he was descended from Esau, and not from Jacob, and was merely an Idumæan. The very circumstance of his being a foreigner caused him to be chosen by the Romans, the better to keep this people in check. The Romans protected the king of their nomination with an army; and Jerusalem was again taken by assault, sacked, and pillaged.
Herod, afterwards protected by Augustus, became one of the most powerful sovereigns among the petty kings of Arabia. He restored Jerusalem, repaired the fortifications that surrounded the temple, so dear to the Jews, and rebuilt the temple itself; but he could not finish it, for he wanted money and workmen. This proves that, after all, Herod was not rich; and the Jews, though fond of their temple, were still fonder of their money.
The name of king was nothing more than a favor granted by the Romans; it was not a title of succession. Soon after Herod's death, Judæa was governed as a subordinate Roman province, by the proconsul of Syria, although from time to time the title of king was granted, sometimes to one Jew, sometimes to another, for a considerable sum of money, as under the emperor Claudius, when it was granted to the Jew Agrippa.
A daughter of Agrippa was that Berenice, celebrated for having been beloved by one of the best emperors Rome can boast. She it was who, by the injustice she experienced from her countrymen, drew down the vengeance of the Romans upon Jerusalem. She asked for justice, and the factions of the town refused it. The seditious spirit of the people impelled them to fresh excesses. Their character at all times was to be cruel; and their fate, to be punished.
This memorable siege, which ended in the destruction of the city, was carried on by Vespasian and Titus. The exaggerating Josephus pretends that in this short war more than a million of Jews were slaughtered. It is not to be wondered at that an author who puts fifteen thousand men in each village should slay a million. What remained were exposed in the public markets; and each Jew was sold at about the same price as the unclean animal of which they dare not eat.
In this last dispersion they again hoped for a deliverer; and under Adrian, whom they curse in their prayers, there arose one Barcochebas, who called himself a second Moses—a Shiloh—a Christ. Having assembled many of these wretched people under his banners, which they believed to be sacred, he perished with all his followers. It was the last struggle of this nation, which has never lifted its head again. Its constant opinion, that barrenness is a reproach, has preserved it; the Jews have ever considered as their two first duties, to get money and children.
From this short summary it results that the Hebrews have ever been vagrants, or robbers, or slaves, or seditious. They are still vagabonds upon the earth, and abhorred by men, yet affirming that heaven and earth and all mankind were created for them alone.
It is evident, from the situation of Judæa, and the genius of this people, that they could not but be continually subjugated. It was surrounded by powerful and warlike nations, for which it had an aversion; so that it could neither be in alliance with them, nor protected by them. It was impossible for it to maintain itself by its marine; for it soon lost the port which in Solomon's time it had on the Red Sea; and Solomon himself always employed Tyrians to build and to steer his vessels, as well as to erect his palace and his temple. It is then manifest that the Hebrews had neither trade nor manufactures, and that they could not compose a flourishing people. They never had an army always ready for the field, like the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Syrians, and the Romans. The laborers and artisans took up arms only as occasion required, and consequently could not form well-disciplined troops. Their mountains, or rather their rocks, are neither high enough, nor sufficiently contiguous, to have afforded an effectual barrier against invasion. The most numerous part of the nation, transported to Babylon, Persia, and to India, or settled in Alexandria, were too much occupied with their traffic and their brokerage to think of war. Their civil government, sometimes republican, sometimes pontifical, sometimes monarchial, and very often reduced to anarchy, seems to have been no better than their military discipline.
You ask, what was the philosophy of the Hebrews? The answer will be a very short one—they had none. Their legislator himself does not anywhere speak expressly of the immortality of the soul, nor of the rewards of another life. Josephus and Philo believe the soul to be material; their doctors admitted corporeal angels; and when they sojourned at Babylon, they gave to these angels the names given them by the Chaldæans—Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel. The name of Satan is Babylonian, and is in somewise the Arimanes of Zoroaster. The name of Asmodeus also is Chaldæan; and Tobit, who lived in Nineveh, is the first who employed it. The dogma of the immortality of the soul was developed only in the course of ages, and among the Pharisees. The Sadducees always denied this spirituality, this immortality, and the existence of the angels. Nevertheless, the Sadducees communicated uninterruptedly with the Pharisees, and had even sovereign pontiffs of their own sect. The prodigious difference in opinion between these two great bodies did not cause any disturbance. The Jews, in the latter times of their sojourn at Jerusalem, were scrupulously attached to nothing but the ceremonials of their law. The man who had eaten pudding or rabbit would have been stoned; while he who denied the immortality of the soul might be high-priest.
It is commonly said that the abhorrence in which the Jews held other nations proceeded from their horror of idolatry; but it is much more likely that the manner in which they at the first exterminated some of the tribes of Canaan, and the hatred which the neighboring nations conceived for them, were the cause of this invincible aversion. As they knew no nations but their neighbors, they thought that in abhorring them they detested the whole earth, and thus accustomed themselves to be the enemies of all men.
One proof that this hatred was not caused by the idolatry of the nations is that we find in the history of the Jews that they were very often idolaters. Solomon himself sacrificed to strange gods. After him, we find scarcely any king in the little province of Judah that does not permit the worship of these gods and offer them incense. The province of Israel kept its two calves and its sacred groves, or adored other divinities.
This idolatry, with which so many nations are reproached, is a subject on which but little light has been thrown. Perhaps it would not be difficult to efface this stain upon the theology of the ancients. All polished nations had the knowledge of a supreme God, the master of the inferior gods and of men. The Egyptians themselves recognized a first principle, which they called Knef, and to which all beside was subordinate. The ancient Persians adored the good principle, named Orosmanes; and were very far from sacrificing to the bad principle, Arimanes, whom they regarded nearly as we regard the devil. Even to this day, the Guebers have retained the sacred dogma of the unity of God. The ancient Brahmins acknowledged one only Supreme Being; the Chinese associated no inferior being with the Divinity, nor had any idol until the times when the populace were Jed astray by the worship of Fo, and the superstitions of the bonzes. The Greeks and the Romans, notwithstanding the multitude of their gods, acknowledged in Jupiter the absolute sovereign of heaven and earth. Homer, himself in the most absurd poetical fictions, has never lost sight of this truth. He constantly represents Jupiter as the only Almighty, sending good and evil upon earth, and, with a motion of his brow, striking gods and men with awe. Altars were raised, and sacrifices offered to inferior gods, dependent on the one supreme. There is not a single monument of antiquity in which the title of sovereign of heaven is given to any secondary deity—to Mercury, to Apollo, to Mars. The thunderbolt was ever the attribute of the master of all, and of him only.
The idea of a sovereign being, of his providence, of his eternal decrees, is to be found among all philosophers and all poets. In short, it is perhaps as unjust to think that the ancients equalled the heroes, the genii, the inferior gods, to him whom they called "the father and master of the gods," as it would be ridiculous to imagine that we associate with God the blessed and the angels.
You then ask whether the ancient philosophers and law-givers borrowed from the Jews, or the Jews from them? We must refer the question to Philo; he owns that before the translation of the Septuagint the books of his nation were unknown to strangers. A great people cannot have received their laws and their knowledge from a little people, obscure and enslaved. In the time of Osias, indeed, the Jews had no books; in his reign was accidentally found the only copy of the law then in existence. This people, after their captivity at Babylon, had no other alphabet than the Chaldæan; they were not famed for any art, any manufacture whatsoever; and even in the time of Solomon they were obliged to pay dear for foreign artisans. To say that the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks, were instructed by the Jews, were to say that the Romans learned the arts from the people of Brittany. The Jews never were natural philosophers, nor geometricians, nor astronomers. So far were they from having public schools for the instruction of youth, that they had not even a term in their language to express such an institution. The people of Peru and Mexico measured their year much better than the Jews. Their stay in Babylon and in Alexandria, during which individuals might instruct themselves, formed the people to no art save that of usury. They never knew how to stamp money; and when Antiochus Sidetes permitted them to have a coinage of their own, they were almost incapable of profiting by this permission for four or five years; indeed, this coin is said to have been struck at Samaria. Hence, it is, that Jewish medals are so rare, and nearly all false. In short, we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched. Still, we ought not to burn them.
Their law must appear, to every polished people, as singular as their conduct; if it were not divine, it would seem to be the law of savages beginning to assemble themselves into a nation; and being divine, one cannot understand how it is that it has not existed from all ages, for them, and for all men.
But it is more strange than all that the immortality of the soul is not even intimated in this law, entitled "Vaicrah and Addebarim," Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
In this law it is forbidden to eat eels, because they have no scales; and hares, because they chew the cud, and have cloven feet. Apparently, the Jews had hares different from ours. The griffin is unclean, and four-footed birds are unclean, which animals are somewhat rare. Whoever touches a mouse, or a mole is unclean. The women are forbidden to lie with horses or asses. The Jewish women must have been subject to this sort of gallantry. The men are forbidden to offer up their seed to Moloch; and here the term seed is not metaphorical. It seems that it was customary, in the deserts of Arabia, to offer up this singular present to the gods; as it is said to be usual in Cochin and some other countries of India, for the girls to yield their virginity to an iron Priapus in a temple. These two ceremonies prove that mankind is capable of everything. The Kaffirs, who deprive themselves of one testicle, are a still more ridiculous example of the extravagance of superstition.
Another law of the Jews, equally strange, is their proof of adultery. A woman accused by her husband must be presented to the priests, and she is made to drink of the waters of jealousy, mixed with worm-wood and dust. If she is innocent, the water makes her more beautiful; if she is guilty, her eyes start from her head, her belly swells, and she bursts before the Lord.
We shall not here enter into the details of all these sacrifices, which were nothing more than the operations of ceremonial butchers; but it of great importance to remark another kind of sacrifice too common in those barbarous times. It is expressly ordered, in the twenty-seventh chapter of Leviticus, that all men, vowed in anathema to the Lord, be immolated; they "shall surely be put to death"; such are the words of the text. Here is the origin of the story of Jephthah, whether his daughter was really immolated, or the story was copied from that of Iphigenia. Here, too, is the source of the vow made by Saul, who would have immolated his son, but that the army, less superstitious than himself, saved the innocent young man's life.
It is then but too true that the Jews, according to their law, sacrificed human victims. This act of religion is in accordance with their manners; their own books represent them as slaughtering without mercy all that came in their way, reserving only the virgins for their use.
It would be very difficult—and should be very unimportant—to know at what time these laws were digested into the form in which we now have them. That they are of very high antiquity is enough to inform us how gross and ferocious the manners of that antiquity were.
It has been pretended that the dispersion of this people had been foretold, as a punishment for their refusing to acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Messiah; the asserters affecting to forget that they had been dispersed throughout the known world long before Jesus Christ. The books that are left us of this singular nation make no mention of a return of the twelve tribes transported beyond the Euphrates by Tiglath-Pileser and his successor Shalmaneser; and it was six hundred years after, that Cyrus sent back to Jerusalem the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, which Nebuchodonosor had brought away into the provinces of his empire. The Acts of the Apostles certify that fifty-three days after the death of Jesus Christ, there were Jews from every nation under heaven assembled for the feast of Pentecost. St. James writes to the twelve dispersed tribes; and Josephus and Philo speak of the Jews as very numerous throughout the East.
It is true that, considering the carnage that was made of them under some of the Roman emperors, and the slaughter of them so often repeated in every Christian state, one is astonished that this people not only still exists, but is at this day no less numerous than it was formerly. Their numbers must be attributed to their exemption from bearing arms, their ardor for marriage, their custom of contracting it in their families early, their law of divorce, their sober and regular way of life, their abstinence, their toil, and their exercise.
Their firm attachment to the Mosaic law is no less remarkable, especially when we consider their frequent apostasies when they lived under the government of their kings and their judges; and Judaism is now, of all the religions in the world, the one most rarely abjured—which is partly the fruit of the persecutions it has suffered. Its followers, perpetual martyrs to their creed, have regarded themselves with progressively increasing confidence, as the fountain of all sanctity; looking upon us as no other than rebellious Jews, who have abjured the law of God, and put to death or torture those who received it from His hand.
Indeed, if while Jerusalem and its temple existed, the Jews were sometimes driven from their country by the vicissitudes of empires, they have still more frequently been expelled through a blind zeal from every country in which they have dwelt since the progress of Christianity and Mahometanism. They themselves compare their religion to a mother, upon whom her two daughters, the Christian and the Mahometan, have inflicted a thousand wounds. But, how ill soever she has been treated by them, she still glories in having given them birth. She makes use of them both to embrace the whole world, while her own venerable age embraces all time.
It is singular that the Christians pretend to have accomplished the prophecies by tyrannizing over the Jews, by whom they were transmitted. We have already seen how the Inquisition banished the Jews from Spain. Obliged to wander from land to land, from sea to sea, to gain a livelihood; everywhere declared incapable of possessing any landed property, or holding any office, they have been obliged to disperse, and roam from place to place, unable to establish themselves permanently in any country, for want of support, of power to maintain their ground, and of knowledge in the art of war. Trade, a profession long despised by most of the nations of Europe, was, in those barbarous ages, their only resource; and as they necessarily grew rich by it, they were treated as infamous usurers. Kings who could not ransack the purses of their subjects, put the Jews, whom they regarded not as citizens, to torture.
What was done to them in England may give some idea of what they experienced in other countries. King John, being in want of money, had the rich Jews in his kingdom imprisoned. One of them, having had seven of his teeth drawn one after another, to obtain his property, gave, on losing the eighth, a thousand marks of silver. Henry III. extorted from Aaron, a Jew of York, fourteen thousand marks of silver, and ten thousand for his queen. He sold the rest of the Jews of his country to his brother Richard, for the term of one year, in order, says Matthew Paris, that this count might disembowel those whom his brother had flayed.
In France they were put in prison, plundered, sold, accused of magic, of sacrificing children, of poisoning the fountains. They were driven out of the kingdom; they were suffered to return for money; and even while they were tolerated, they were distinguished from the rest of the inhabitants by marks of infamy. And, by an inconceivable whimsicality, while in other countries the Jews were burned to make them embrace Christianity, in France the property of such as became Christians was confiscated. Charles IV., by an edict given at Basville, April 4, 1392, abrogated this tyrannical custom, which, according to the Benedictine Mabillon, had been introduced for two reasons:
First, to try the faith of these new converts, as it was but too common for those of this nation to feign submission to the gospel for some personal interest, without internally changing their belief.
Secondly, because as they had derived their wealth chiefly from usury, the purity of Christian morals appeared to require them to make a general restitution, which was effected by confiscation.
But the true reason of this custom, which the author of the "Spirit of Laws" has so well developed, was a sort of "droit d'amortissement"—a redemption for the sovereign, or the seigneurs, of the taxes which they levied on the Jews, as mortmainable serfs, whom they succeeded; for they were deprived of this benefit when the latter were converted to the Christian faith.
At length, being incessantly proscribed in every country, they ingeniously found the means of saving their fortunes and making their retreats forever secure. Being driven from France under Philip the Long, in 1318, they took refuge in Lombardy; there they gave to the merchants bills of exchange on those to whom they had entrusted their effects at their departure, and these were discharged.
The admirable invention of bills of exchange sprang from the extremity of despair; and then, and not until then, commerce was enabled to elude the efforts of violence, and to maintain itself throughout the world.
Letters to Joseph, Ben, Jonathan, Aaron, Mathatai, and David Wincker.
FIRST LETTER.
Gentlemen: When, forty-four years ago, your countryman Medina became a bankrupt in London, being twenty thousand francs in my debt, he told me that "it was not his fault; that he was unfortunate"; that "he had never been one of the children of Belial"; that "he had always endeavored to live as a son of God"—that is, as an honest man, a good Israelite. I was affected; I embraced him; we joined in the praise of God; and I lost eighty per cent.