are, should serve to convert you from what you are to what you ought to be; and if it should please the God of Israel, our God as well as yours, to cause you to repent this day with all your heart, it is in your power, by making abjuration, to give authentic evidence of the sincerity of your conversion. Without giving you offence-for for my wish is solely to convince you-I shall endeavour to shew you your error, and so undeceive you with regard to your tenets, so that if you are reasonable beings, you cannot fail to become Catholics. Unhappy men! who, ignorant of the very creed you profess, mistake ridiculous forms for acts of religion, how I could wish that all your teachers, who are scattered over the world, could be here this day, to be my hearers; for so demonstratively shall I destroy the foundation of your hopes, that you would be compelled, by their judgment as well as your own, to become of the number of the faithful, however obstinately you and they might wish to persist in remaining Jews. True it is, that without a pious disposition of the will, it is hard to convince the understanding: still, so forcible are the arguments that I shall this day submit to your attention, that they cannot fail to elicit from your judgment a conclusion adverse to the falsehood of yours, and in favour of the truth of our faith.

V.

In order that the demonstrations I may give, may prove of sufficient efficacy to convince you of your error, I shall not advance any theological arguments; for these depend on principles which either are unknown to you through ignorance, or will be rejected by

your stubborn apostasy. I will not avail myself of the New Testament; for your creed will not admit the supposition, that through baptism you are constrained to believe in its truth: neither will I attempt to persuade you by the evidence of our fathers, as I suppose their authority will be held in suspicion by your incredulous minds; nor by the rendering of the Old Testament according to our Vulgate, as you do not admit that to be canonical; but by your own Hebrew or Chaldaic version, which you hold as sacred authority, not admitting of doubt or controversy. This, then, will be the text from which I shall draw all my arguments. The expositions of your rabbins, on whose doctrines you ground your faith as Jews, will be added in corroboration. Only listen dispassionately to me, and you will find that prejudice must yield to the force of evidence.

VI.

The prophet Isaiah, in chap. xlii. of his Prophecies, saw in a vision the wretched state into which the Jews, on account of their sins, would fall after the advent of Christ, who was and is the true Messiah that God promised to the world in his Scriptures, and left them a warning against their delusion in these words:

"Ipse autem populus direptus et vastatus: laqueus "juvenum omnes, et in domibus carcerum absconditi "sunt: facti sunt in rapinam, nec est qui eruat; in "direptionem, nec est qui dicat: Redde."

Know, ye unhappy people (says the prophet), know, that after the coming of the Messiah, you will be a dispersed nation throughout the world, and bondsmen

in every land; for you are to be a ruined and scattered people: "Ipse autem populus direptus et vastatus."

The small remnants of your former greatness, which are left as an authentic testimony of the chastisement of your sins, shall form a net, that will with a sudden motion draw you into a fearful prison, so that each shall be taken into a separate dungeon and immured in his cell with such secrecy that no one shall know who went in yesterday, and the one who is taken there to-day shall not know who it is that goes in to-morrow: "In domibus carcerum absconditi sunt."

You will be reduced to such misery, O unfortunate people! that your nation of old and young will be quarelling with one another; and you will form a net for your mutual distress and entanglement: "Laqueus juvenum universitas ipsorum vel omnes ipsi," says your Hebrew text.

Thus, conformably to the prophecy, you confound and entangle yourselves, O wretched sons of Israel, whom a severe imprisonment awaits which you have no means of averting; for Judaism being the crime with which you are charged, your involvement is such that no aid can avail to effect your liberation: "Facti “sunt in rapinam, nec est qui eruat; in direptionem, nec est qui dicat: Redde."

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VII.

That this passage in Isaiah contemplated the punishment that the Jews are now suffering, your own experience must be sufficient to convince you; for you yourselves are in the very condition into which the prophet says you would fall after the advent of the Messiah. You yourselves see how you are dispersed all

over the world, and scattered throughout every land; and either from necessity or inclination hold yourselves apart from one another, so that even if you meet privately to perform the rites of Judaism, you avoid each other in public, in order to deceive those who charge you with being Jews. You yourselves bewail your misfortunes, and complain to us Catholics that your enemies ensnare you, and draw you so suddenly and indiscriminately into the meshes of our Holy Office, that all of your lineage are exposed to the same calamity; and although you mutually proclaim your afflictions to one another, there is no one who has the power to rescue you therefrom. All these facts, founded upon your own experience, fully prove that the prophet alludes to you in his text. If it be possible to suppose that this argument is not sufficient to establish the point, the evidence of your own Rabbi Samuel will serve to do so; for a thousand years ago, this rabbi, in his celebrated epistle, acknowledges that Rabbi Isaac, seven hundred and five years previously, had written that this captivity had befallen you for the sin you committed in putting Christ to death:"Apertè dicit Deus quod erit desolatio post occisionem "Christi; sicut est nostra desolatio, postquam Jesus "fuit occisus."

VIII.

My brethren, do you see all these tokens already fulfilled, of what was to happen to you after the Messiah had come, according to the word of your prophet? Either you do or you do not. If you do not, you are blind; for the very thing is at this moment happening to every individual among you. If you do, why do you

not disabuse yourselves, and admit that your hope is a manifest error, and that the Messiah you expect can never come, since these tokens prove that He has already been? Subsequently to the Messiah's coming, you were to be a dispersed and ruined people: "Populus direptus et vastatus." You were all to be ensnared conjointly or separately: "Laqueus universitas ipsorum, vel omnes ipsi." You were not to be imprisoned together in gaol, but each of you was to have a separate cell to himself: "In domibus carcerum absconditi sunt." So strong was to be the prison, and so rigid the confinement, that no arm would be able to rescue you therefrom: "Facti sunt in rapinam, nec est qui eruat; in direptionem, nec qui est dicat: Redde."

Now at this day if you experience all these things, and your ancestors have experienced the same for so many years past, how can you expect a future advent, if it was after the advent all these things were to occur? What madness in you to look to the future for what is already past! After witnessing the consequences that were to follow the advent of the Messiah, you still continue to look forward to that event. The captivity continues, the imprisonment does not cease, the net goes on strengthening, the dispersion extending: the destruction is prolonged, and the Messiah does not appear. After the Messiah had come, you were to undergo all this: the event proves that the coming has already taken place; and yet you, with this event in view, still expect him to come. Verily this is a part of the severe punishment that God has inflicted on you for the horrid sacrilege of murdering his Son. You hope for the Messiah, in opposition to