The twelfth Council of Toledo, in 681, repeats these merciless severities, which (it is no wonder to find) could not be carried into effect, except by direct State interference, and adds others of a like character. ‘The Jews,’ it is ordered, ‘are to offer themselves, their children, and their servants for baptism:’ they ‘shall not celebrate the Passover, or practise circumcision:’ they ‘shall not presume to observe the Sabbath or any Jewish festival:’ they ‘shall not dare to defend their religion to the disparagement of the Christian faith:’ and ‘they shall not read books abhorred by the Christian faith.’ The penalties for breach of these and the like statutes had hitherto been death. But the extreme severity of such a sentence, it is argued, had acted as a preventive to its being enforced. Therefore new orders were issued, by which the rigour of the punishments was abated. Henceforth, if a Jew profaned the name of Christ or of the Holy Trinity, or rejected the Sacraments, or kept the Jewish feasts, or worked on the Sunday, he was _only_ to receive one hundred lashes on his naked body, and afterwards be put into chains and banished from the country, his whole property being confiscated to the State! If a man circumcised his child, he was to suffer mutilation, or if it were a woman who so offended, she was to lose her nose. If a Jew presumed to take a public office under a noble, he was to forfeit half his property, and suffer scourging; but if it was under an ecclesiastical superior that he undertook a situation of trust, he was to lose his whole estate, or be burned alive! The reader will surely call to mind Solomon’s saying, respecting the ‘tender mercies of the wicked,’ as he reads these ordinances. But the avenger was at hand. For some years past the tide of Saracen conquest had been rolling along the northern coast of Africa, until it had reached the kingdom of Morocco; when it must turn southward into the barren wastes of the Sahara, or northwards, into the populous and fertile land of Spain. There could be little doubt which of the two they would prefer; and Wamba, one of the wisest and ablest of the Gothic sovereigns of Spain, in anticipation of such a catastrophe, collected a fleet, with which he encountered the Saracens, A.D. 675, and inflicted on them a disastrous defeat, which deferred the invasion of Spain for nearly forty years. But in the reign of Egica, and still more in that of his successor, Witiza, the imminent danger of the Spanish monarchy became so evident, and the fear that the Jews would co-operate in and accelerate the Mussulman invasion so alarming, that measures were taken to prevent it which indicate at once terror, haste, and self-reproach.