“There you have it.”

“No, no!  We have not done with this question so speedily.  See, I do not grudge you your faith, nor do I wish to disturb it.  The child must believe, that all its parents do and require of him is right, but the stranger sees with different, keener eyes, than the son and daughter.  You occupy a filial relation towards your Church—­I do not.  I know the doctrine of Jesus Christ, and if I had lived in Palestine in his time, should have been one of the first to follow the Master, but since, from those days to the present, much human work has mingled with his sublime teachings.  This too must be dear to you, for it belongs to your parents—­but it repels me.  I have lived, labored and watched all night for the truth, and were I now to come before the baptismal font and say ‘yes’ to everything the priests ask, I should be a liar.”

“They have caused you bitter suffering; tortured your wife, driven you and your family from your home. . . .”

“I have borne all that patiently,” cried the doctor, deeply moved.  “But there are many other sins now committed against me and mine, for which there is no forgiveness.  I know the great Pagans and their works.  Their need of love extends only to the nation, to which they belong, not to humanity.  Unselfish justice, is to them the last thing man owes his fellow-man.  Christ extended love to all nations, His heart was large enough to love all mankind.  Human love, the purest and fairest of virtues, is the sublime gift, the noble heritage, he left behind to his brothers in sorrow.  My heart, the poor heart under this black doublet, this heart was created for human love, this soul thirsted, with all its powers, to help its neighbors and lighten their sorrows.  To exercise human love is to be good, but they no longer know it, and what is worse, a thousand times worse, they constantly destroy in me and mine the desire to be good, good in the sense of their own Master.  Worldly wealth is trash—­to be rich the poorest happiness.  Yet the Jew is not forbidden to strive for this, they take scarcely half his gains;—­nor can they deny him the pursuit of the pleasures of the intellect—­pure knowledge—­for our minds are not feebler or more idle, and soar no less boldly than theirs.  The prophets came from the East!  But the happiness of the soul—­the right to exercise charity is denied to us.  It is a part of charity for each man to regard his neighbor as himself—­to feel for him, as it were, with his own heart—­to lighten his burdens, minister unto him in his sorrows, and to gladden his happiness.  This the Christian denies the Jew.  Your love ceases when you meet me and mine, and if I sought to put myself on an equality with the Christian, from the pure desire to satisfy his Master’s most beautiful lesson, what would be my fate?  The Jew is not permitted to be good.  Not to be good!  Whoever imposes that upon his brother, commits a sin for which I know no forgiveness.  And if Jesus Christ should return to earth and see the pack that hunts us, surely He, who was human love incarnate, would open His arms wide, wide to us, and ask:  ‘Who are these apostles of hate?  I know them not!’”