where punishment was meted out to them for breaches of the law, they underwent the Biblical penalty of being stoned to death; and this was inflicted by certain of their brethren, who, it appears, were appointed for that very purpose, and were recompensed for their treachery with the property of their victims. The persecution of the Hebrew under these atrocious laws, exercised indirectly a great influence upon the destinies of Europe. The Jews of the Peninsula had long entertained intimate relations with their co-religionists of the northern coast of Africa; the oppression under which they languished; the confiscation of their property; the seizure of their children; their enforced proselytism; and the prospect of the ultimate annihilation of their race, tightened the bonds of union existing between them and their African brethren; established an understanding between itinerant traders and the Moorish conquerors of the West; and thus invited and accomplished the Mohammedan conquest of Spain. The most drastic of these regulations against the Jews were enacted under the reign of Ervigius, in the latter part of the seventh century; and, less than forty years afterwards, the whirlwind of Saracen invasion swept the Visigothic monarchy from the face of the earth. The cruel and unrelenting pursuit of the Jews, commanded by the Visigothic Code, was the foundation of the Spanish Inquisition and its diabolical procedure. From it were derived many of the dogmas, tortures, and penalties, of that awful tribunal; with the exception, that what was once only directed against a single sect, was destined eventually to include the votaries of every heresy. That the descendants of a nation renowned throughout all antiquity as ardent lovers of liberty, should, in a few short generations, be transformed into the most merciless of persecutors, is one of the most remarkable political anomalies to be met with in history. Even San Isidoro, referring to driving the Jews to baptism, and into enforced communion with the Church, declared indignantly that it was “_non secundum scientiam_;” a remark which, made under the reign of Sisibutus, in the beginning of the seventh century, is one of remarkable significance, as emanating from a Father of the Church, in an age of almost universal ignorance and religious prejudice.