=5. End of Manasseh’s Story.=――Manasseh, after the disappointing decision of the Council of State, waited on month after month, hoping that the informal permission of the Protector might become the law of the land. His companions grew tired, and went back to their homes in Amsterdam, but Manasseh stayed on, patient and steadfast in his purpose, and longing to complete his work. Early in 1656 he published his _Vindiciæ Judæorum_, a triumphant answer to the slanders which were uttered against his people. And that was his last effort in the cause. His mission never fulfilled itself in the grand, complete way which he had hoped. He sowed his seed, and it is we, his descendants, who, ‘rejoicing, bear the sheaves.’ He would have been content that it should be so. In the autumn of 1657, when his book was launched and he could do no more, he set out for home. And, at home, in Amsterdam, before he reached it, they made ready his grave. For illness overtook him on the way, and on November 20, 1657, at Middleburg, in the house of Ephraim Abarbanel, his brother-in-law, Manasseh ben Israel died. CHAPTER XXXIV. SPINOZA. =1. Clouds obscure the Dawn.=――The dawn which had arisen on the Jews in Holland had now fairly spread to England. But so long and so stormy had been the night, that the dawn was dark and tempestuous, and the light of perfect day was still very far off. Dense clouds swept ever and anon across the Jewish horizon, and one such heavy mist hung over the community in Amsterdam even as Manasseh was so manfully striving to disperse the fogs in London. And these mists and clouds and fogs, which rose up obscuring the dawn, were due sometimes as much to Jewish as to Christian atmospheric conditions. It is a strange fact to record, that at the very time when Manasseh was earnestly pleading to the English nation for religious liberty and freedom of conscience to be granted to the Jews, the elders of his own congregation in Amsterdam seemed to be as seriously engaged in denying these rights to one of their body, a young man of four-and-twenty, who, now known to the world as Benedict Spinoza, is accounted ‘great among the greatest as a thinker.’[52]