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Rh while the charm of indolence beguiled them into giving up the seventh year also to inaction."

And yet this eccentric people, who feared not the gods and despised or hated all uncircumcised mankind—who had not an idol in their temple, nor permitted a picture to enter their dwellings—whose "customs, at once perverse and disgusting, owed their strength to their very badness,"—were not without their virtues, and these puzzled Tacitus far more than their vices. To their own countrymen, and to converts to their religion, they are singularly charitable; and be it remarked that charity, in the Jewish and Christian import of the word, was unknown either to Greeks or Romans. Nay, Tacitus even cannot help admiring their conception of the Deity, or some of their social practices. "It is a crime with them to kill a newly-born infant." It was not a crime at Rome. The Jews held "that the souls of all who perish in battle, or by the hands of the executioner, are immortal;" and in this faith they fought valiantly; they contemned death; they rejoiced in the number of their children. Of "the Deity, as one in essence, they have purely mental conceptions. They call those profane who make representations of God in human shape out of perishable materials. They believe that Being to be supreme and eternal, capable neither of representation nor of decay. They therefore do not allow any images to stand in their cities, much less in their temples. This flattery is not paid to their kings, nor this honor to our emperors." So far so good; but then follows a most unfortunate conjecture. "From the fact that the Jewish priests used to chant to the music of flutes and cymbals, and to wear garlands of ivy, and that a