This is the sorrowful history of Simon Abeles. Whoever judges the Jesuit narrative impartially will discover in it something which the narrator wishes to conceal; and whoever contemplates with horror the fanatical murder, will nevertheless not spend much sympathy on the fanatical priests. They tear the scarcely born child out of the arms of its mother; they consider it a pious contrivance to steal the suckling secretly from her, by means of spies and tale-bearers; by promises and threatenings, and excitement of the imagination, they win hosts of proselytes in baptism to their God, who is very unlike the God of the gospel; with the skill of experienced managers, they make use of a miserable murder, for the sake of bringing on the scene a real tragedy, and of the dead body of a Jewish boy, in order by pomp and glitter and enormous processions, and if possible by miracles, to recommend their faith to both Christians and Jews. Their fanaticism, in alliance with the burgher magistracy and the compliant law, stands in comparison with that of a despised, persecuted, and impulsive race; cunning, violence, malice and a corrupt morality, are to be discovered on both sides. During yet two generations, the zeal of the Jesuits against the Jews continued to work, the struggle of two foreign communities on German ground. The one consisted of the sons of the old dwellers in the wilderness, whose leader, the Lord Jehovah, brought them forth with their flocks and herds, going before them in the fiery pillar, and pouring his wrath on all who fell away from him. And opposed to these were the followers of a Spanish nobleman, who had undertaken the monstrous task of forming the souls of men like the wheels of a machine, making all the highest intellectual powers serve the one single object, of a priesthood to the one appointed officer of the great head of the church militant, Jesus.