And when occasionally a ray of tolerance found its way to these outcast people, and under the spell of its genial warmth the degraded dog was metamorphosed again into a human being, and the Jewish mind awoke again into life, and the Jew, strengthened and rejuvenated and encouraged, dared to enter again into the arena of useful activity, that single ray was at once recalled by priests, who were more cunning and contriving than humane and godly, for only upon the suffering of the mother-religion could the daughter-religion expect to exist. It was feared that the prosperity of Judaism would prove the absurdity of Christianity's and Islam's claims and prophecies. If the Jews are permitted to prosper and flourish and follow their religion, and that religion is shown to be full of life and vigor, what reason for existence have the daughter-religions? Success and prosperity must accompany only that religion which the masses are to accept and follow, and for which superiority is claimed over the others. Such was their sophistical and self-interested reasoning, and so they afflicted and tortured the Jews, denied them every human right, and then kindly and magnanimously credited God with their own wickedness, claiming that God visited these punishments upon the Jews for their rejection of Christ or Mohammed. Hence, the uninterrupted persecutions and sufferings of the Jews. But God had not withdrawn his guiding hand from His Chosen People. He had cast them down, but he forsook them not. Never before had they been so nigh unto extinction, and still they despaired not. With David they said: 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff shall comfort me.'[14] They lost not their faith in God and in their divine mission. They doubted not that there was a meaning to their sudden change of fortune. They believed that as each seed when sown must endure darkness and suffer decay before it can multiply its kind a hundredfold, so had God scattered the children of Israel as seeds among the nations of the earth, and subjected them to threats and sufferings that the number of true believers might increase a thousandfold. They regarded it a special distinction to be chosen by God to spread monotheism and civilization among the children of men.[15] [14] Ps. xxiii. 4. [15] Talmud Babli, Pessachim 87 b.