So it had leaked out, even in his own town--where an anonymous prophet should be without dishonor--that _he_ was the author of the infamous _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, the "traitor to State and Church" of refuting pamphleteers, the bogey of popular theology. In vain, then, had his treatise been issued with "Hamburg" on the title-page. In vain had he tried to combine personal peace with impersonal thought, to confine his body to a garret and to diffuse his soul through the world. The forger of such a thunderbolt could not remain hid from the eyes of Europe. Perhaps the illustrious foreigners and the beautiful bluestockings who climbed his stairs--to the detriment of his day's work in grinding lenses--had set the Hague scenting sulphur. More probably the hot-headed young disciples to whom he had given oral or epistolary teaching had enthusiastically betrayed him into fame--or infamy. It had always been thus, he mused, even in those early half-forgotten days when he was emancipating himself from the Ghetto, and half-shocked admirers no less than heresy-hunters bore to the ears of the Beth-din his dreadful rejection of miracle and ceremony. Poor Saul Morteira! How his ancient master must have been pained to pronounce the Great Ban, though nothing should have surprised him in a pupil so daring of question, even at fifteen. And now that he had shaken off the Ghetto, or rather been shaken off by it, he had scandalized no less shockingly that Christendom to which the Ghetto had imagined him apostatizing: he had fearlessly contradicted every system of the century, the ruling Cartesian philosophy no less than the creed of the Church, and his plea for freedom of thought had illustrated it to the full. True, the Low Countries, when freed from the Spanish rack, had nobly declared for religious freedom, but at a scientific treatment of the Bible as sacred literature even Dutch toleration must draw the line, unbeguiled by the appeal to the State to found itself on true religion and ignore the glossing theologians. "What evil can be imagined greater for a State than that honorable men, because they have thoughts of their own and cannot act a lie, are sent as culprits into exile or led to the scaffold?" Already the States-General had attached the work containing this question and forbidden its circulation: now apparently persecution was to reach him in person, Christendom supplementing what he had long since suffered from the Jewry. He thought of the fanatical Jew whose attempt to stab him had driven him to live on the outskirts of Amsterdam even before the Jews had persuaded the civil magistrates to banish him from their "new Jerusalem," and in a flash of bitterness the picturesque Portuguese imprecations of the Rabbinic tribunal seemed to him to be bearing fruit. "According to the decision of the angels and the judgment of the saints, with the sanction of the Holy God and the whole congregation, we excommunicate, expel, curse, and execrate