, he had to be silent as the Host was carried past outside. When
a Catholic festival occurred, he was forced not only to swallow his rage
but to let his house be hung with decorations in sign of joy; if he had
inherited a fortune from his fathers, having neither social standing nor
civil rights, it slipped gradually out of his hands, and went to support
the schools and hospitals of his foes. Having reached the end of his
life, his deathbed was made miserable; for dying in the faith of his
fathers, he could not be laid to rest beside them, and like a pariah he
would be carried to his grave at night, no more than ten of those near
and dear to him being allowed to follow his coffin.

Lastly, if at any age whatever he should attempt to quit the cruel soil
on which he had no right to be born, to live, or to die, he would be
declared a rebel, his goads would be confiscated, and the lightest
penalty that he had to expect, if he ever fell into the hands of his
enemies, was to row for the rest of his life in the galleys of the king,
chained between a murderer and a forger.

Such a state of things was intolerable: the cries of one man are lost in
space, but the groans of a whole population are like a storm; and
this time, as always, the tempest gathered in the mountains, and the
rumblings of the thunder began to be heard.

First there were texts written by invisible hands on city walls, on
the signposts and cross-roads, on the crosses in the cemeteries: these
warnings, like the 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin' of Belshazzar, even
pursued the persecutors into the midst of their feasts and orgies.

Now it was the threat, "Jesus came not to send peace, but a sword." Then
this consolation, "For where two or three are gathered together in My
name, there am I in the midst of them." Or perhaps it was this appeal
for united action which was soon to become a summons to revolt, "That
which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have
fellowship with us."

And before these promises, taken from the New Testament, the persecuted
paused, and then went home inspired by faith in the prophets, who spake,
as St. Paul says in his First Epistle to the Thessalonians, "not the
word of men but the word of God."

Very soon these words became incarnate, and what the prophet Joel
foretold came to pass: "Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions... and
I will show