Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/350

344 they threatened him, that all contracts and bargains should be void, unless he would submit to bear all the outward and visible signs of Judaism.

Our apostate hearing this stretched himself upon his back, spread his legs, and waited for the operation: but when he saw the high-priest take up the cleft stick, he roared most unmercifully, and swore several Christian oaths, for which the Jews rebuked him.

The savour of the effluvia, that issued from him, convinced the old Levite and all his assistants, that he needed no present purgation, wherefore without farther anointing him he proceeded in his office; when by an unfortunate jerk upward of the impatient victim, he lost five times as much as ever Jew did before.

They, finding that he was too much circumcised, which by the levitical law is worse than not being circumcised at all, refused to stand to any of their contracts: wherefore they cast him forth from their synagogue: and he now remains a most piteous, woeful, and miserable sight at the sign of the Old Testament and Dial in Fleet street; his wife (poor woman) is at this hour lamenting over him, wringing her hands and tearing her hair; for the barbarous Jews still keep, and expose at Jonathan's and Garraway's, the memorial of her loss, and her husband's indignity. PRAYER.