Da Costa meanwhile had reached middle age, had been made submissive by conflicts and excitement, and longed for repose. By process of law, which he had instituted against the Amsterdam authorities, he could obtain nothing, because he could not put his complaints into a tangible form; he consented, therefore, to everything demanded for his humiliation. His public penance was to be very severe. There was no definite prescription on the subject in the religious Code, which, in fact, is opposed in spirit to public penance; the sinner is not to confess aloud his transgressions against religion, but in silence to God. Judaism, from its origin, objected to confession and the mechanical avowal of sins. For this reason it remained for the college of rabbis to appoint a form of penance. The Amsterdam rabbis and the communal council, consisting of Marranos, adopted as a model the gloomy form of the tribunal of the Inquisition. As soon as Da Costa had consented to his humiliation, he was led into one of the synagogues, which was full of men and women. There was to be a sort of auto-da-fé, and the greatest possible publicity was given to his penance because the scandal had been public. He had to ascend a stage and read out his confession of sins: that he had desecrated the Sabbath, violated the dietary laws, denied articles of faith, and advised persons not to adopt Judaism. He solemnly declared that he resolved to be no longer guilty of such offenses, but to live as a true Jew. On a whisper from the first rabbi, probably Saul Morteira, he went to a corner of the synagogue, stripped as far as the girdle, and received thirty-nine stripes with a scourge. Then he was obliged to sit on the ground, after which the ban was removed. Not yet having satisfied the authorities, he had to stretch himself out on the threshold of the synagogue, that those present might step over him. It was certainly an excessive penance which was imposed upon him, not from a desire of persecution or vengeance, but from religious scrupulousness and mimicry of Catholic forms. No wonder that the disgrace and humiliation deeply wounded Da Costa, who had consented to the punishment, not from inward repentance, but from exhaustion. The public disgrace had shaken his whole being, and suggested thoughts of revenge. Instead of pitying the rabbis as the creatures of historical conditions, he hated them with a glowing feeling of revenge as the refuse of mankind, and as if they thought of nothing but deception, lying, and wickedness. His wounded sense of honor and heated imagination saw in the Jews of the Amsterdam community, perhaps in all the Jews on the earth's surface, his personal, venomous foes, and in Judaism an institution to stir up men to hatred and persecution. Thinking that he was surrounded by bitter enemies, and feeling too weak for a fresh conflict, he resolved to die, but at the same time to take vengeance on his chief persecutor, his brother (or cousin). To