Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

whom the Lord invited to his table to eat the horse and the horseman, and that only the birds were the guests. I am willing to believe it.

.

Were the Jewish Ladies intimate with Goats?

You assert that your mothers had no commerce with he-goats, nor your fathers with she-goats. But pray, gentlemen, why are you the only people upon earth whose laws have forbidden such commerce? Would any legislator ever have thought of promulgating this extraordinary law, if the offence had not been common?

Did the Jews immolate Human Victims?

You venture to affirm that you have never immolated human victims to the Lord. What then was the murder of Jephtha's daughter, who was really immolated, as we have already shown from your own books?

How will you explain the anathema of the thirtytwo virgins, that were the tribute of the Lord, when you took thirty-two thousand Midianitish virgins and sixty-one thousand asses? I will not here tell you, that according to this account there were not two asses for each virgin; but I will ask you, what was this tribute for the Lord? According to your book of Numbers, there were sixteen thousand girls for your soldiers, sixteen thousand for your priests; and on the soldiers' share there was levied a tribute of thirty-two virgins for the Lord. What became of them? You had no nuns. What was the Lord's share in all your wars, if it was not blood?

Did not the priest Samuel hack in Agag, whose life king Saul had saved? sacrifice him as the Lord's share?

pieces king Did he not

Either renounce your sacred books, in which, according to the decision of the church, I firmly believe, or acknowledge that your forefathers offered up to God rivers of human blood, unparalleled by any people upon earth.

31

The Thirty-two Thousand Virgins, the Seventy-five Thousand Oxen, and the fruitful Desert of Midian.

Let your secretary no longer evade no longer equivocate, respecting the carnage of the Midianites and their villages. I feel great concern that your butcher-priest Eleazar, general of the Jewish armies, should have found in that little miserable and desert country, seventy-five thousand oxen, sixty-one thousand asses, and six hundred and seventy-five thousand sheep, without reckoning the rams and the lambs.

Now, if you took thirty-two thousand infant girls, it is likely that there were as many infant boys, and as many fathers and mothers. These united amount to a hundred and twenty-eight thousand captives, in a desert where there is nothing to eat, nothing to drink but brackish water, and which is inhabited by some wandering Arabs, to the number of two or three thousand at most. You will besides observe, that in all the maps this frightful country is not more than eight leagues long, and as many broad.

But were it as large, as fertile, and as populous as Normandy or the Milanese, no matter. I hold to thetext, which says the Lord's share was thirty-two maidens. Confound as you please Midian by the Red Sea with Midian by Sodom; I shall still demand an account of my thirty-two thousand virgins.

Have you employed your secretary to calculate how many oxen and maidens the fine country of Midian is capable of feeding?

Gentlemen, I inhabit a canton which is not the Land of Promise; but we have a lake much finer than that of Sodom, and our soil is moderately productive. Your secretary tells me that an acre of Midian will feed three oxen: I assure you, gentlemen, that with us an acre will feed but one. If your secretary will triple the revenue of my lands, I will give him good wages, and will not pay him with drafts on the receivers-general. He will not find a better situation in all the country of Midian than with me; but unfortu

nately this man knows no more of oxen than he does of golden calves.

As for the thirty-two thousand maidenheads, I wish him joy of them. Our little country is as large as Midian. It contains about four thousand drunkards, a dozen attorneys, two men of sense, and four thousand persons of the fair sex, who are not uniformly pretty. These together make about eight thousand people, supposing that the registrar who gave me the account did not exaggerate by one-half, according to custom. Either your priests or ours would have considerable difficulty in finding thirty-two thousand virgins for their use in our country. This makes me very doubtful concerning the numberings of the Roman people, at the time when their empire extended just four leagues from the Tarpeian rock, and they carried a handful of hay at the end of a pole for a standard. Perhaps you do not know, that the Romans passed five hundred years in plundering their neighbours before they had any historian, and that their numberings, like their miracles, are very suspicious.

As for the sixty-one thousand asses, the fruits of your conquests in Midian-enough has been said of

asses.

Jewish Children Immolated by their Mothers.

I tell you, that your fathers immolated their children; and I call your prophets to witness. Isaiah reproaches them with this cannibalish crime-" Slaying the children of the vallies under the clefts of the rocks."*

You will tell me, that it was not to the Lord Adonaï that the women sacrificed the fruit of their womb-that it was to some other God. But what matters it whether you called him to whom you offered up your children Melkom or Sadaï, or Baal, or Adonaï? That which it imports us to know is, that you were parricides. It was to strange idols, you say, that your fathers made their offerings. Well, I pity you still more for being descended from fathers at once both

Isaiah, lvii. 5.

parricidal and idolatrous. I condole with you, that your fathers were idolaters for forty successive years in the desert of Sinaï, as is expressly said by Jeremiah, Amos, and St. Stephen.

You were idolaters in the time of the Judges; and the grandson of Moses was priest of the tribe of Dan, who, as we have seen, were all idolaters; for it is necessary to repeat to insist; otherwise everything is forgotten.

You were idolaters under your kings; you were not faithful to one only God, until after Esdras had restored your books. Then it was that your uninterruptedly true worship began; and by an incomprehensible providence of the Supreme Being, you have been the most unfortunate of all men ever since you became the most faithful-under the kings of Syria, under the kings of Egypt, under Herod the Idumæan, under the Romans, under the Persians, under the Arabs, under the Turks-until now, that you do me the honour of writing to me, and I have the honour of answering you.

SIXTH LETTER.

Beauty of the Land of Promise.

Do not reproach me with not loving you. I love you so much, that I wish you were in Hershalaïm, instead of the Turks, who ravage your country; but who, nevertheless, have built a very fine mosque on the foundations of your temple, and on the platform constructed by your Herod.

You would cultivate that miserable desert, as you cultivated it formerly; you would carry earth to the bare tops of your arid mountains; you would not have much corn, but you would have very good vines, a few palms, olive trees, and pastures.

Though Palestine does not equal Provence, though Marseilles alone is superior to all Judea, which had not one sea-port; though the town of Aix is incomparably better situated than Jerusalem, you might nevertheless make of your territory almost as much

as the Provençals have made of theirs. You might execute, to your hearts' content, your own detestable psalmody in your own detestable jargon.

It is true, that you would have no horses; for there are not, nor have there ever been, about Hershalaïm, any but asses. You would often be in want of wheat, but you would obtain it from Egypt or Syria.

You might convey merchandise to Damascus and to Seïd on your asses-or indeed on camels-which you never knew anything of in the time of your Melchim, and which would be a great assistance to you. In short, assiduous toil, to which man is born, would fertilise this land, which the lords of Constantinople and Asia Minor neglect.

This promised land of yours is very bad. Are you acquainted with St. Jerome? He was a christian priest, one of those men whose books you do not read. However, he lived a long time in your country; he was a very learned person--not indeed slow to anger, for when contradicted he was prodigal of abuse-but knowing your language better than you do, for he was a good grammarian. Study was his ruling passion; anger was only second to it. He had turned priest, together with his friend Vincent, on condition that they should never say mass nor vespers,* lest they should be too much interrupted in their studies; for being directors of women and girls, had they been moreover obliged to labour in the priestly office, they would not have had two hours in the day left for Greek, Chaldee, and the Jewish idiom. At last, in order to have more leisure, Jerome retired altogether, to live among the Jews at Bethlehem, as Huet bishop of Avranches retired to the jesuits at the house of the professed, rue St. Antoine, at Paris.

Jerome did, it is true, embroil himself with the bishop of Jerusalem, named John, with the celebrated priest Rufinus, and with several of his friends; for, as I have already said, Jerome was full of choler and self-love, and St. Augustin charges him with levity

That is, that they should perform no sacerdotal functions.

« AnteriorContinua »