In Portugal, when early in the nineteenth century liberty of conscience was proclaimed, strange individuals from the interior of the country appeared at the synagogues of Lisbon and Oporto. They were the descendants of the old _Marranos_. For three centuries they had eluded the ferrets of the Holy Office and, Christians in appearance, had remained Jews at heart, waiting, as only a Jew can wait, for the blessed day of deliverance. They now emerged, and came to participate with their brethren in the worship of their God after the fashion of their fathers. Thus the good seed sown in Western Europe during the preceding century brought forth its fruit. England could not long remain a stranger to the march of events. But, slow as usual and averse from hasty experiments, she pondered while others performed. Besides, she had been spared the volcanic eruption of the Continent which, while destroying much that was venerable and valuable, had cleared the ground for the reception of new things. There is every reason to believe that the ordinary Englishman’s view of the Jews during the first half of the nineteenth century differed in no respect from the view entertained by the ordinary American of the same period, as described by Oliver Wendell Holmes.[139] The ordinary Englishman, like his transatlantic cousin, grew up inheriting the traditional Protestant idea that the Jews were a race lying under a curse for their obstinacy in refusing the Gospel. The great historical Church of Christendom was presented to him as Bunyan depicted it. In the nurseries of old-fashioned English Orthodoxy there was one religion in the world--one religion and a multitude of detestable, literally damnable impositions, believed in by countless millions, who were doomed to perdition for so believing. The Jews were the believers in one of these false religions. It had been true once, but now was a pernicious and abominable lie. The principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money and to fulfil the predictions of the old prophets of their race. No doubt, the individual sons of Abraham whom the ordinary Englishman found in the ill-flavoured streets of East London were apt to be unpleasing specimens of the race and to confirm the prevailing view of it.