is mind on _not_ doing sin: his day should be too full of
joyous service." The Messianic Age would be, my Master taught, when
every man did what was right and just of mere natural impulse, not
even remembering that he was doing right, still less being uplifted on
that account, for no man is proud because he walks or sleeps. Then
would Righteousness be incarnate in the world, and the devil finally
defeated, and every man would be able to make celestial unions and
soul-ascensions.

Many sufferings did the Baal Shem endure in the years that I was with
him. Penury and persecution were often his portion, and how his wife's
death wounded him I have already intimated. But it was the revival of
the Sabbatian heresy by Jacob Frank that caused him the severest
perturbation. This Frank, who was by turns a Turk, a Jew, and a
Catholic, played the role of successor of Zevi, as Messiah, ordered
his followers to address him as the Holy Lord, and, later, paraded his
beautiful daughter, Eve, as the female Godhead. Much of what my
grandfather had told me of the first Pretender was repeated, save that
as the first had made alliance with the Mohammedans, so the second
coquetted with the Christians. Hence those public disputations,
fostered by the Christians, in which the Frankists did battle with the
Talmudists, and being accredited the victors, exulted in seeing the
sacred books of the Rabbis confiscated. When a thousand copies of the
Talmud were thrown into a great pit at Kammieniec, and burned by the
hangman, the Baal Shem shed tears, and joined in the fast-day for the
burning of the Torah. For despite his detestation of the devil's
knots, he held that the Talmud represented the oral law which
expressed the continuous inspiration of the leaders of Israel, and
that to rely on the Bible alone was to worship the mummy of religion.
Nor did he grieve less over the verbal tournament of the Talmudists
and Frankists in the Cathedral of Lemberg, when the Polish nobility
and burghers bought entrance tickets at high prices. "The devil, not
God, is served by religious disputations," said the Master. And when
at last the Frankists were baptized in their thousands, and their
Messiah in pompous Turkish robes paraded the town in a chariot drawn
by six horses, and surrounded by Turkish guards, the Baal Shem was
more pleased than grieved at this ending. When these Jewish Catholics,
however, came to grief, and, on the incarceration of Frank by the
Polish