And yet what had I to do with these childish superstitions?--I whose race preached the great doctrine of the Unity to a world sunk in vice and superstition; whose childish lips were taught to utter the _Shemang_ as soon as they could form the syllables; who _know_ that the Christian creed is a monstrous delusion! To think that I have lent the sanction of my manhood to these grotesque beliefs. Grotesque, say I? when to Paul they are the essence of all lofty feeling and aspiration! And yet I know that he is blind, or sees things with that strange perversion of vision of which I have heard him accuse the Jews--my brethren. He believes what he has been taught. And who taught him? _Bozhe moi!_ was it not I who have brought him up in these degrading beliefs, which he imagines I share? God! is this my punishment, that he is faithful to the creed taught him by a father who was faithless to his own? And yet there were excuses enough for me, Thou knowest. Why did these forms and ceremonies, which now loom beautiful to me through a mist of tears, seem hideous chains on the free limbs of childhood? Was it my father's fault or my own that the stereotyped routine of the day; that the being dragged out of bed in the gray dawn to go to synagogue, or to intone in monotonous sing-song the weary casuistries of the rabbis; that the endless precepts or prohibitions, made me conceive religion as the most hateful of tyrannies? Through the cloud of forty years I can but dimly recall the violence of the repulsion with which things Jewish inspired me--of how it galled me to feel that I was one of that detested race, that I was that mockery and byword, a _Zhit_; that, with little sympathy with my people, I was yet destined to partake of its burdens and its disabilities. Bitter as my soul is within me to-day, I can yet understand, can yet half excuse, that fatal mistake of ignorant and ambitious youth.