=1. Deterioration of Character.=――The effects of all the evil treatment which we have traced, began to be clearly manifest in the Jewish character. The ravages on Jewish life and on Jewish property were not the worst results of these ages of persecution. The real injury done to the Jews went far deeper than any amount of outrage or wrong might inflict on an individual. ‘Few natures,’ writes the Laureate, ‘are of such fine mould, that if you sow therein the seed of hate, it blossoms charity.’ Jewish nature is of ‘fine mould,’ or under such a course of manuring, and such a season of neglect, it might well have become altogether overrun with rank weeds. Seeds once planted can, nevertheless, only follow the law of nature, and blossom and bear fruit according to their kind. Forced into secret and sordid ways, denied hope, aim, or ambition of any worthy sort, contemptuously shunned when they were not actively hunted, ‘protected’ by princes and persecuted by priests, what wonder if Jews at last became ‘degraded,’ never indeed to the level of what they were thought, but something undoubtedly below the level of what they should have been? Agur’s prayer was a wise one. ‘Give me, O Lord,’ he says, ‘neither poverty nor riches: lest I be full, and deny Thee; or lest I be poor, and steal.’ Jews, for generations, were subject to the extreme of both the temptations which Agur prayed against. The cultivated Marannos of Spain yielded to the one; they were ‘full,’ and for continued wealth and ease they denied their God. The ignorant clippers of coin in England yielded to the other temptation; they were poor, and stole.