y, he seemed to see that all these
passages of prediction he had taken on trust as prognostications of a
Redeemer might prophesy quite other and more intelligible things. And
long past midnight he read among the Prophets, with flushed cheek and
sparkling eye, as one drunk with new wine. What sublime truths, what
aspirations after peace and justice, what trumpet-calls to
righteousness!

He thrilled to the cry of Amos: "Take thou away from me the noise of
thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let
judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."
And to the question of Micah: "What doth the Lord require of thee but
to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" Ay,
justice and mercy and humbleness--not paternosters and penances. He
was melted to tears, he was exalted to the stars.

He turned to the Pentateuch and to the Laws of Moses, to the tender
ordinances for the poor, the stranger, the beast. "Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself." "Thou shalt be unto me a holy people."

Why had his ancestors cut themselves off from this great people, whose
creed was once so sublime and so simple? There had reached down to him
some vague sense of the nameless tragedies of the Great Expulsion when
these stiff-necked heretics were confronted with the choice of
expatriation or conversion; but now he searched his book-shelves
eagerly for some chronicle of those days of Torquemada. The native
historians had little, but that little filled his imagination with
horrid images of that second Exodus--famine, the plague, robbery,
slaughter, the violation of virgins.

And all on account of the pertinacious ambition of a Portuguese king
to rule Spain through an alliance with a Spanish princess--an ambition
as pertinaciously foiled by the irony of history. No, they were not
without excuse, those ancestors of his who had been left behind
clinging to the Church. Could they have been genuine converts, these
Marranos, or New Christians? he asked himself. Well, whatever his
great-grandfathers had felt, his father's faith had been ardent
enough, of that he could not doubt. He recalled the long years of
ritual; childish memories of paternal pieties. No, the secret
conspiracy had not embraced the Da Costa household. And he would fain
believe that his more distant progenitors, too, had not been
hypocrites; for aught he knew they had gone over to the Church even
before the Expulsion; at any rat