e Devil's crew.
Thy face took never so deep a shade
But we fought them in it, God our aid!
A trophy to bear, as we march, thy band,
South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!" 120

[Pope Gregory XVI abolished this bad business of the Sermon.
--R. B.]

NOTES:
"Holy-Cross Day" reflects the attitude of the corrupt mediaeval
Christians and Jews toward each other. The prose
preceding the poem gives the point of view of an imaginary
Bishop's Secretary, who congratulates himself upon
the good work the Church is doing in forcing its doctrine
on the Jews in the Holy-Cross Day sermon, and effecting
many conversions. The poem shows that the Jews regard
this solicitude on the part of the Christians with hatred
and scorn, and that their conversions are in derision of
their would-be converters. The sarcasm of the speaker
reaches a pinnacle of bitterness when he accuses the
Christian bishops of being men he had helped to their sins
and who now help him to their God. From scorn toward
such followers of Christ, he passes, in the contemplation
of Rabbi Ben Ezra's death song, to a defence of Christ
against these followers who profess but do not act his
precepts, and a hope that if the Jews were mistaken in
not accepting Christ, the tortures they now suffer will be
received as expiation for their sin.

Holy-Cross Day is September 14. The discovery of the
true cross by Saint Helen inaugurated the festival, celebrated
both by Latins and Greeks as early as the fifth or
sixth century, under the title of the Exaltation of the
Cross and later in commemoration of the alleged miraculous
appearance of the Cross to Constantine in the sky
at midday. Though the particular incidents of the poem
are not historical, it is a fact (see Milman's "History of the
Jews'') that, by a Papal Bull issued by Gregory XIII in
1584, all Jews above the age of twelve years were compelled
to listen every week to a sermon from a Christian
priest.

52. Corso: a street in Rome

67. Rabbi Ben Ezra: or Ibn Ezra, a mediaeval Jewish
writer and thinker, born in Toledo, near the end of the
eleventh century.

III. Ghetto: the Jew's quarter. Pope Paul IV first
shut the Jews up in the Ghetto, and prohibited them from
leaving it after sunset.

PROTUS

Among these latter busts we count by