The Sultan proposed to test his pretensions by shooting three poisoned arrows at him. If these failed to wound or injure him, his title should be at once acknowledged; if the result should be different, death or the profession of Mahometanism must be his sentence. Sabbathai did not hesitate. Following the example of Nehemiah, he placed a turban on his head and exclaimed—‘There is but one God, and Mahomet is His Prophet!’ It is most extraordinary that this apostasy, evidently the result of mere cowardice and imposture, did not provoke the contempt alike of the Turks and the Jews. But by the Sultan he was loaded with honours, and the Jews did not withdraw their belief in his miraculous pretensions. With unabated impudence he put out a declaration to the effect that God had changed him from an Israelite to an Ishmaelite. He quoted the example of Moses, who dwelt for a time among the Ethiopians, and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, where it is said that the Messiah was numbered among the transgressors. For a long time he continued to maintain his double character of the deliverer of the Jews and the devoted believer in Mahomet. Some even declared, after the fashion of the Gnostics in the early Church, that the true Sabbathai had been taken up into heaven, and it was only his likeness or phantom that had undergone degradation and apostasy. Great numbers of Jews, indeed, were induced, by his example, to become Mahometans; and at length the injury to the Jewish community became so great, that they exerted all the influence they could command with the grand vizier, who caused Sabbathai to be arrested and banished into Bosnia. There, in 1676, ten years after his apostasy to Mahometanism, and in the fifty-first year of his age, he expired in a castle near Belgrade. According to some, he died a natural death; according to others, he was beheaded in prison. The latter is the more likely supposition. Though he endeavoured to persuade the Jews that, notwithstanding his profession of another faith, he was at heart a Jew, they entirely distrusted him; and it is likely that the assurances to which they would lend no credit nevertheless caused suspicion and uneasiness among true followers of Mahomet. Thus it would be the interest of both parties to cut short his career. In the long catalogue of impostors who have succeeded for a time in blinding the eyes of those to whom they pretended a mission, the case of Sabbathai Sevi seems the most extraordinary.