and creed; the persecutions that they
momentarily suffered at other times had no signification beyond the
exhibition of popular spite and fury, but those above cited were moves
calculated to extirpate the creed, if not the people, from off the face
of the globe. If repressive measures are of any avail, circumcision as
an Hebraic rite should now have no existence. Its present existence and
observance show a vitality that is simply phenomenal; its resistance and
apparent indestructibility would seem to stamp it as of divine origin.
No custom, habit, or rite has survived so many ages and so many
persecutions; other customs have died a natural death with time or want
of persecution, but circumcision, either in peace or in war, has held
its own, from the misty epochs of the stone age to the present.

There is something pathetic and soul-appealing in contemplating the
early Christians forced to worship in the catacombs of Rome, hunted like
wild animals in their subterranean burrows, and then given the choice of
making offerings to the heathen gods or being thrown into the arena as
prey to wild beasts; so are we stirred when we think of the Spanish Jew,
who had made Spain his home for centuries, being driven into exile in
such droves that no country could receive them; we see them perishing of
hunger by the thousands on the African coast, and dying of starvation on
the quays of the ports of civilized Italy. That many, through all these
trials, were forced to embrace other religions is not astonishing. In
Spain apostacy was to no purpose, as the Inquisition could not be
expected to split hairs in regard to an apostate Jew, when it sent the
best of Gothic blood, raised in the Catholic faith, to the _auto da fe_
or the scaffold,--the rack respecting neither faith nor profession that
fell into its clutches. In milder persecutions, however, he escaped by
outwardly conforming to the demands of his oppressors and history tells
us of the circumcisions secretly performed on the dead Jew, that the
spirit of the law of their fathers might be carried out.

In other cases, threatened exile, confiscation, or exorbitant taxation
drove them to adopt every possible expedient to eradicate the sign of
their Israelitism and make attempts to reform a prepuce. The first
attempts in this line were made during the reign of Antiochus, when a
number of Hebrews wished to become as the people about them who were not
persecuted--_fecerunt cibi praeputia_