Many sufferings did the Baal Shem endure in the years that I was with him. Penury and persecution were often his portion, and how his wife's death wounded him I have already intimated. But it was the revival of the Sabbatian heresy by Jacob Frank that caused him the severest perturbation. This Frank, who was by turns a Turk, a Jew, and a Catholic, played the rôle of successor of Zevi, as Messiah, ordered his followers to address him as the Holy Lord, and, later, paraded his beautiful daughter, Eve, as the female Godhead. Much of what my grandfather had told me of the first Pretender was repeated, save that as the first had made alliance with the Mohammedans, so the second coquetted with the Christians. Hence those public disputations, fostered by the Christians, in which the Frankists did battle with the Talmudists, and being accredited the victors, exulted in seeing the sacred books of the Rabbis confiscated. When a thousand copies of the Talmud were thrown into a great pit at Kammieniec, and burned by the hangman, the Baal Shem shed tears, and joined in the fast-day for the burning of the Torah. For despite his detestation of the devil's knots, he held that the Talmud represented the oral law which expressed the continuous inspiration of the leaders of Israel, and that to rely on the Bible alone was to worship the mummy of religion. Nor did he grieve less over the verbal tournament of the Talmudists and Frankists in the Cathedral of Lemberg, when the Polish nobility and burghers bought entrance tickets at high prices. "The devil, not God, is served by religious disputations," said the Master. And when at last the Frankists were baptized in their thousands, and their Messiah in pompous Turkish robes paraded the town in a chariot drawn by six horses, and surrounded by Turkish guards, the Baal Shem was more pleased than grieved at this ending. When these Jewish Catholics, however, came to grief, and, on the incarceration of Frank by the Polish Inquisition, were reduced to asking alms at church-doors, the Baal Shem was alone in refusing to taunt them for still gazing longingly towards "the gate of Rome," as they mystically called the convent of Czenstochow, in which Frank lay imprisoned. And when their enemies said they had met with their desert, the Baal Shem said: "There is no sphere in Heaven where the soul remains a shorter time than in the sphere of merit, there is none where it abides longer than in the sphere of love." Much also in these troublous times did the Baal Shem suffer from his sympathy with the sufferings of Poland, in its fratricidal war, when the Cossacks hung up together a nobleman, a Jew, a monk, and a dog, with the inscription: "All are equal." Although these Cossacks, and later on the Turks, who, in the guise of friends of Poland, turned the Southern provinces into deserts, rather helped than hindered the cause of his followers by diverting their persecutors, the Baal Shem palpitated with pity for all--dogs, monks,