is, its members
felt that this was too much. Uriel Acosta was again excommunicated.

And now began new years of persecution, more grievous, more determined
than ever. Again his house was stoned, his name a byword, his walks
abroad a sport to the little ones of a new generation. And now even
the worst he had feared came to pass. Gradually his brother, who had
refused on various pretexts to liberate his capital, encroached on his
property. Uriel dared not complain to the civil magistrates, by whom
he was already suspect as an Atheist; besides, he still knew no Dutch,
and in worldly matters was as a child. Only his love for his brother
turned to deadly hate, which was scarcely intensified when Joseph led
Ianthe under the marriage canopy.

So seven terrible years passed, and Uriel, the lonely, prematurely
aged, found himself sinking into melancholia. He craved for human
companionship, and the thought that he could find it save among Jews
never occurred to him. And at last he humbled himself, and again
sought forgiveness of the synagogue.

But this time he was not to be readmitted into the fold so lightly.
Imitating the gloomy forms of the Inquisition, from which they had
suffered so much, the elders joined with the Rabbis in devising a
penance, which would brand the memory of the heretic's repentance upon
the minds of his generation.

Uriel consented to the penance, scarcely knowing what they asked of
him. Anything rather than another day of loneliness; so into the great
synagogue, densely filled with men and women, the penitent was led,
clothed in a black mourning garb and holding a black candle. He whose
earliest dread had been to be shamed before men, was made to mount a
raised stage, wherefrom he read a long scroll of recantation,
confessing all his ritual sins and all his intellectual errors, and
promising to live till death as a true Jew. The _Chacham_, who stood
near the sexton, solemnly intoned from the seventy-eighth Psalm: "But
He, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity and destroyed
them not: yea, many a time turned He his anger away and did not stir
up all his wrath. For He remembered that they were but flesh: a wind
that passeth away and cometh not again."

He whispered to Uriel, who went to a corner of the synagogue, stripped
as far as the girdle, and received with dumb lips thirty-nine lashes
from a scourge. Then, bleeding, he sat on the ground, and heard the
ban solemnly removed. Finally, don