But if the progress of reason is slow, it is sure. A few years after the publication of Addison’s essay, the Jews already established in England were recognised as British subjects. ♦1725♦ Two years later a Jewish mathematician was made Fellow of the Royal Society, and not long after a Jew became secretary and librarian of the Society. Judges also refrained from summoning Jewish witnesses on the Sabbath. ♦1753♦ The concession of 1723 was followed, thirty years later, by the right of naturalisation. But, even then, though the Commons passed the Bill, the Lords and the Bishops endorsed it, and King George II. ratified it, so loud an outcry from traders and theologians arose thereat that the gift had to be revoked. “No more Jews, no wooden shoes,” was the elegant refrain in which the British public sang its sentiments on the subject, and the effigy of an enlightened Deacon, who had defended the Act, was burnt publicly at Bristol. England, which in the Middle Ages had been induced to persecute and expel the Jews by the example of the Continent, was once more to be influenced by the Continental attitude towards the race. Fortunately, this influence was now of a different kind. CHAPTER XIX THE EVE OF EMANCIPATION ABOUT the middle of the eighteenth century a new spirit had arisen on the Continent of Europe; or rather the spirit of the Renaissance, suppressed in Italy, had re-asserted itself in Central Europe under a more highly developed form. Seventeen hundred years had passed since the heavenly choir sang on the plain of Bethlehem the glorious anthem, “Peace on earth, good-will toward men.” And the message which had been blotted out in blood, while the myth and the words were worshipped, was once more heard in a totally different version. Those who delivered it were not angels, but men of the world; the audience not a group of rude Asiatic shepherds, but the most polished of European publics; and the tongue in which it was delivered not the simple Aramaic of Palestine, but the complex vehicle of modern science. Once more man, by an entirely new route, had arrived at the one great truth, the only true commandment: “Love one another, O ye creatures of a day. Bear with one another’s faults and follies. Life is too brief for hatred; human blood too precious to be wasted in mutual destruction.”