But this doctrine explains still more clearly the cause of God’s wrath against Israel. The Jews boast that since the Babylonian captivity, they have been free from idolatry, but this is not true. They have not made images, that is, they have avoided the form, but they have retained all the substance of idolatrous heathenism. The man who charms a serpent is an idolater, and the religion which permits it is idolatrous and heathenish. The man who asks counsel of demons is an idolater of the worst class, for he does homage to unclean spirits. He turns his back upon the allwise God, who ought to be the counsellor of all his children, and by making demons his advisers, makes them his gods, and yet this is also allowed in the religion of the rabbies if it can be done without danger. Those Jews, therefore, who believe in the oral law—that is, all Jews who make use of the synagogue prayers, have departed from the law and the God of Moses, and have chosen for themselves the doctrines and the gods of the rabbies. How then can God have compassion upon them and gather them? The thing is impossible, until they utterly renounce all these delusions, confess their sin in having followed them so long, and “return and seek the Lord their God and David their king.” A long trial has been made of the rabbinical medicine, and it has altogether failed. Wherever the religion of the oral law has been or is predominant, its sway has been marked by the misery of the people. And the first dawn of a happier day has appeared only since the time that a part of the nation burst the fetters of rabbinic superstition. Compare the state of the German Jews with that of their brethren in Turkey or on the coast of Morocco. Some of the former have abandoned the oral law, and the latter still cling to it with a bigoted devotion; and yet the former have had a blessing in the improvement of their temporal and intellectual condition, and the latter still remain in mental and corporeal slavery. The mere renunciation of Rabbinism has produced these beneficial effects, and if the Jews of Europe go on from the renunciation of error to the attainment of truth, that is, if they return to the religion of Moses and the prophets, the promises of God will be fulfilled, and the nation will be restored to the land of their fathers.