No damnation--ay, but no salvation either. They teach naught of
immortality; their creed is of the earth, earthy."

"Then why didst thou drag me from Portugal?" inquired Joseph angrily.

But Uriel--the fire of God--was not to be quenched; and so, not
without frequent warning, fell the fire of man. In a solemn conclave
in the black-robed synagogue, with awful symbolisms of extinguished
torches, the ban was laid upon Uriel Acosta, and henceforth no man,
woman, or child dared walk or talk with him. The very beggars refused
his alms, the street hawkers spat out as he passed by. His own mother
and brother, now completely under the sway of their new Jewish circle,
removed from the pollution of his presence, leaving him alone in the
great house with the black page. And this house was shunned as though
marked with the cross of the pestilence. The more high-spirited
Jew-boys would throw stones at its windows or rattle its doors, but it
was even keener sport to run after its tenant himself, on the rare
occasions when he appeared in the streets, to spit out like their
elders at the sight of him, to pelt him with mud, and to shout after
him, "Epicurean!" "Bastard!" "Sinner in Israel!"

VIII

But although by this isolation the Rabbis had practically cut out the
heretic's tongue--for he knew no Dutch, nor, indeed, ever learned to
hold converse with his Christian neighbors--yet there remained his
pen, and in dread of the attack upon them which rumor declared him to
be inditing behind the shuttered windows of his great lonely house,
they instigated Samuel Da Silva, a physician equally skilled with the
lancet and the quill, to anticipate him by a counterblast calculated
to discredit the thunderer. He denied immortality, insinuated the
horrified Da Silva, in his elegant Portuguese treatise, _Tradado da
Immortalide_, probably basing his knowledge of Uriel's "bestial and
injurious opinions" on the confused reports of the heretic's brother,
but refraining from mentioning his forbidden name.

"False slanders!" cried Uriel in his reply--completed--since he had
been anticipated--at his leisure; but he only confirmed the popular
conception of his materialistic errors, seeming, indeed, of wavering
mind on the subject of the future life. His thought had marched on:
and whereas it had been his complaint to Joseph that Rabbinism laid no
stress on immortality, further investigation of the Pentateuch had
shown him that Moses himself had taken