Astonishment gave place to dismay, and dismay to indignation and abhorrence, as he realized into what a network of ceremonial he had entangled himself. The Pentateuch itself, with its complex codex of six hundred and thirteen precepts, formed, he discovered, but the barest framework for a parasitic growth insinuating itself with infinite ramifications into the most intimate recesses of life.
What! Was it for this Rabbinic manufacture that he had exchanged the stately ceremonial of Catholicism? Had he thrown off mental fetters but to replace them by bodily?
Was this the Golden Age that he had looked to find—the simple Mosaic theocracy of reason and righteousness?
And the Jews themselves, were these the Chosen People he had clothed with such romantic glamour?—fat burghers, clucking comfortably under the wing of the Protestant States-General; merchants sumptuously housed, vivifying Dutch trade in the Indies; their forms and dogmas alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he was tricked, trapped, betrayed!
His wrath gathered daily, finding vent in bitter speeches. If this was what had become of the Mosaic Law and the Holy People, the sooner a son of Israel spoke out the better for his race. Was it not an inspiration from on high that had given him the name of Uriel—"fire of God"? So, when his private thunders had procured him a summons before the outraged Rabbinic court, he was in no wise to be awed by the Chacham and his Rabbis in their solemn robes.
"Pharisees!" he cried, and, despite his lost Christianity, all the scorn of his early training clung to the word.
"Epicurean!" they retorted, with contempt more withering still.
"Nay, Epicurus have I never read, and what I know of his doctrine by hearsay revolteth me. I am for God and Reason, and a pure Judaism."
"Even so talked Elisha Ben Abuya in Palestine of old," put in the second Rabbi more mildly. "He with his Greek culture, who stalked from Sinai to Olympus, and ended in Atheism."
"I know not of Elisha, but I marvel not that your teaching drove him to Atheism."