=5. Their Acquired Intolerance.=――It is a sad thing to find that Jews, who had so suffered from the terrors of the Inquisition, should have set up a little tribunal of their own, and invested it with similar powers over religious offences; and very strange that those who had experienced the horrors of penance and excommunication should have imitated the proceedings of those persecutors in the treatment of members of their own faith, whom they considered heretical in religious matters. But this actually happened. The effects of persecution have now and again made Jews a little ‘mixed’ in their morals as well as in their manners. The Jews of Holland, with that long-denied gift of religions freedom at last in their hands, grasped it somewhat over-tight, and in their delight at holding their Judaism fast and firm in the sight of all men, they were not always quite as careful as they might have been to do unto others as they were so very thankful to be at last done unto. =6. An Instance in Point: Uriel da Costa.=――Amongst those disguised Jews of Spain who, the better to conceal their Judaism, went even to the length of taking the office and performing the rites of Catholic priests, was a certain Uriel da Costa. When the Amsterdam settlement gave its chance to Jews of living true lives, da Costa gladly enough left Spain, threw off his disguise, and joined his brethren in faith. But he had been for too many years dwelling as a Catholic among Catholics to be able to become all at once a strict and orthodox Jew. He had grown used to ceremonial of one sort, ceremonial of another sort, perhaps even, for a while, of any sort, was irksome to him. He neglected Jewish observances, and, what was less pardonable, he spoke and wrote against many cherished Jewish practices, denouncing and ridiculing them as relics of formalism and superstition. It was something more than imprudent. His own long failure in courageous profession of his faith should have led da Costa to consider himself quite unfitted to give any opinion whatever as to the correct forms of its observance. He had expressed his Judaism throughout the best part of his life by entire silence: silence would better have become him still. He had submitted to circumstances, and lived a life of active religious deceit: it could have been no great strain on such a seasoned conscience to conform to what the bulk of his people were content to accept. Little sympathy can be felt with the hasty attitude of opposition in which da Costa conceitedly placed himself to the congregation of Amsterdam, but still less for the unfortunate spirit in which his opposition was resisted. He was first excommunicated by theological authority, and a little later, when he had published an attack upon the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, he was sentenced by the Dutch civic authority, which the congregation most unwisely invoked, to a term of imprisonment. So closed the first act in this discreditable affair.