the same indignity to enable the
tax-gatherer to harvest the impost which he paid for his liberty of
conscience and not being circumcised. When the monkish missionaries of
the Catholic faith first entered Abyssinia, they were shocked to find
their converts insisting on their time-honored practice of circumcision;
and later, when the Propaganda sent its own missionaries, they were
scandalized to see Christians practicing what they looked upon as an
infidel rite; and nothing but the most earnest confession of faith, with
the assurance that the rite of circumcision was only a physical remedy,
and that in their conscience it in no wise possessed any religious
significance, and that neither did they, in any sense, hold it in any
connection with the sacrament of baptism, permitted these Abyssinians to
save themselves from excommunication. Later still, when an Abyssinian
bishop was present in Lisbon, the clergy of the city refused him the
right of celebrating the sacrifice of the holy mass in the Cathedral of
Lisbon, on the ground that he, having been circumcised, was no better
than a heretic. The Abyssinian Christians still practice the rite at the
present day.

The Turks, although very fanatical and greater proselyters than the
Christians of Rome, seem now and then to relax in favor of general
utility, as we find Bajazet II writing to the Pope, Alexander VI,
supplicating his Holiness to confer a cardinal's hat on the Archbishop
of Arles as a special favor to the Turkish emperor, as he knew that the
archbishop _had a secret leaning toward Mohammedanism_. As the clergy of
those days, from the Holy Father down, were more politicians than
followers of the humble Nazarene, the heaven of Mohammed had probably
more attractions for their taste than the ideal Christian paradise, and
it is possible that the good archbishop would have submitted to a
cardinal's hat and circumcision at the same time to secure the good
things of this world and of those in the world to come. History also
relates that his most Christian majesty, Henry III, of France, as a
relaxation to the interminable squabble between two Christian religious
factions which were rending France, and which in the end cost him his
life, actually wrote a letter to the Sultan, asking the favor to be
allowed to stand as godfather at the circumcision of his son. When it is
remembered that the godfather at a Turkish circumcision has to make a
strong profession of Moslem faith and