ght go in front to avoid
the danger."

Thus far the Jesuit's narrative. On the scaffold Levi made a manly
confession of his deed before all the people, with a request that the
witnesses who had only spoken the truth should no longer be kept in
prison. The details of the execution were particularly horrible; the
experienced executioner could not--so the writer states--break the
strong body of the criminal on the wheel. At last Levi called to the
priest by his side and asked him in a clear voice what he would promise
if he should consent to be baptized? When the father promised him,
besides forgiveness of all his sins, also a speedy death, Levi
answered: 'I will be baptized.' The Church triumphant hastened to
impart private baptism, much disposed to attribute this unheard of
bodily strength and calm of the malefactor to a special miracle of
Divine Providence. Levi repeated the prescribed formula with a strong
voice, and received calmly the now effective stroke of death.

This is the sorrowful history of Simon Abeles. Whoever judges the
Jesuit narrative impartially will discover in it something which the
narrator wishes to conceal; and whoever contemplates with horror the
fanatical murder, will nevertheless not spend much sympathy on the
fanatical priests. They tear the scarcely born child out of the arms of
its mother; they consider it a pious contrivance to steal the suckling
secretly from her, by means of spies and talebearers; by promises and
threatenings, and excitement of the imagination, they win hosts of
proselytes in baptism to their God, who is very unlike the God of the
gospel; with the skill of experienced managers, they make use of a
miserable murder, for the sake of bringing on the scene a real tragedy,
and of the dead body of a Jewish boy, in order by pomp and glitter and
enormous processions, and if possible by miracles, to recommend their
faith to both Christians and Jews. Their fanaticism, in alliance with
the burgher magistracy and the compliant law, stands in comparison with
that of a despised, persecuted, and impulsive race; cunning, violence,
malice and a corrupt morality, are to be discovered on both sides.

During yet two generations, the zeal of the Jesuits against the Jews
continued to work, the struggle of two foreign communities on German
ground. The one consisted of the sons of the old dwellers in the
wilderness, whose leader, the Lord Jehovah, brought them forth with
their flocks and herds,