Page:The old paths, or The Talmud tested by Scripture.djvu/57

 Rabbinical millennium would commence by handing over all such to the executioner. Their talents, their virtue, their learning, their moral excellence, would avail nothing. Found guilty of epicureanism or apostasy, because they dared to think for themselves, and to act according to their convictions, they would have to undergo the epicurean's or the apostate's fate.

Such is the toleration of the oral law towards native Israelites, but it is equally severe to converts. It allows no second thoughts. It legislates for relapsed converts, as the Spanish Inquisition did for those Jews who, after embracing Christianity, returned to their former faith and sentences all such to death.

"A Noahite who has become a proselyte, and been circumcised and baptized, and afterwards wishes to return from after the Lord, and to be only a sojourning proselyte, as he was before, is not to be listened to—on the contrary, either let him be an Israelite in everything, or let him be put to death." (Hilchoth Melachim, c. x. 3.) In this law there is an extraordinary severity. The oral law admits that a Noahite, that is, a heathen who has taken upon himself the seven commandments of the children of Noah, may be saved. It cannot, therefore, be said that the severity was dictated by a wish to deter men from error, and to restrain them from rushing upon everlasting ruin, as the Inquisition pleads. The oral law goes a little further, and not only will not permit a man to change his creed, but will not even suffer him to change his ceremonial observances. Though the man should commit no crime, and though he should continue to worship the one true God, in spirit and in truth, yet if he only alter the outward forms of his religion, modern Judaism requires that he should be put to death.

But the tender care of the oral law is not limited to the narrow confines of Judaism, it extends also to the heathen, amongst whom it directs the true faith to be propagated by the sword. First, it gives a particular rule. In case of war with the Gentiles, it commands the Jews to offer peace on two conditions—the one that they should become tributaries, the other that they should renounce idolatry and take upon them the seven precepts of the Noahites, and then adds—