conceive a change reaching, as it does, to the whole man, that can even be contemplated apart from Christ,-His teaching, sympathy, death, His resurrection and glory. No instance of repentance is more genuine than that of St. Peter; but it was the eye of the Lord Jesus that broke his heart; and it was the loving word of Jesus, asking him thrice about his love, but not whispering one word about his sin,-this grieved him to the heart. "It is a settled point," says Calvin, "that repentance not only follows upon faith, but springs out of it." 3. But on this we would lay especial stress, viz., let repentance be kept in its proper place. If it ever be presented, directly or indirectly, as a ground of peace with God, souls are damaged fearfully in their dearest interests. There, in the great question of reconciliation with God, let the sanctifying work of the Spirit on the soul have no mention. Render to Christ the things that are Christ's, and to the Spirit the things that are the Spirit's. We are afraid of speaking of repentance as an experience which the sinner must attain before he believes. Anything which seems like preparation for receiving Christ has at least a suspicious air. Inquiring souls are ever prone to bring something to Christ. "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord?" Come, we say, with nothing. Only come yourself. If a man brings his repentance as the price of peace, Christ will be no party to such negotiation. Repentance is one thing-Divine atonement is another. Repentance is the work of the Spirit-Divine atonement was finished by Christ. Peace with God never can spring from looking at myself, any more than a patient can get health by watching the symptoms of his disease. It is not my character, my feelings, my experience, that can give peace, but Christ, who is my peace. Seeking to bring a sinner to peace with God, there is but one name, one way, one atoning sacrifice "God in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself." To Him I must come, and come as a sinner,-sincerely, honestly, without the cloak of self-righteousness, or bringing the bribe of merit, or pleading even my repentance as any recommendation. Í come, as a sinner, to the Saviour; my coming in that spirit shows my need; and thus to Christ alone, my all in all,— "Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind; Sight, riches, healing of the mind, Yea, all I need in thee to find, O Lamb of God, I come!" W. B. M. THE JEWS IN EUROPE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. CHAP. IV.—THE JEWS IN FRANCE. PASS we now across the Channel with the banished Hebrews, and there let us strive to restore to their pristine order the stray Sibylline leaves of their history in France; a task which many revolutions and prolonged disabilities render more difficult even than in England. There also, as in Spain, this Semitic element was more entirely diffused through the whole body of society, and for a more lengthened period, than in our own country; and hence the distinction between the Jew and his Christian master, though never wholly lost sight of, was more often in danger of being obliterated, from the want in the French character of that distinctiveness and self-isolation which mark the Englishman in every age. The Frenchman of all ranks had less difficulty in associating with the cosmopolite Hebrew than was felt by the exclusive islander. But if he thus became more intimate with the child of Abraham, it was unhappily for the most part only the more to oppress him. Familiarity did away in France with much of that awe which sometimes operated to preserve the life and property of the English Jew; who, if like Cain he wandered "a fugitive and a vagabond" in a land not his own, had still, it might be thought, an indelible mark set by God upon his countenance, which might prevent the awe-struck Gentile from slaying that singular being who seemed to be, under the new dispensation, the outcast and accursed of God. But when, as in France, the Hebrew race long formed numerically so large a portion of the community, it was found that they were men of like passions with their Christian neighbours. And as they gained in the eyes of medieval critics a place, though the lowest, in the standard of recognised society, so they lost the privileges which, in ignorant times and countries, attach to the exceptions of humanity, as now in the East to the madman, the idiot, and the fool. The Jew, when no longer regarded as labouring under the immediate visitation of God, did not therefore become more, but rather less, safe in the hands of the rude men of the middle ages, with whom nothing could compensate for inferiority of physical strength and personal prowess. Imbecility of mind they sometimes regarded with reverence-imbecility of body only furnished additional temptations to put in practice "The good old rule, the simple plan, That they should take who have the power, We have before seen one of the Merovingian kings effecting Jewish conversion by force; and Gregory of Tours tells us that they were already in his time numerous and wealthy in Gaul, and noted for the practice of usury.* Subsequent princes of the line of Clovis, Clothaire II., and Dagobert, increased the Jewish disabilities; and the councils of Rheims and Chalons-sur-Marne endeavoured to check their traffic in Christian slaves. Bat the intolerance of the Rois Fainéants of the later Merovingian race was exchanged for the conciliatory policy adopted by the wiser Carlovingians towards such wealthy and useful subjects. The empire of Charlemagne opened a wide field for their commercial industry. In the south of France especially they formed the link between the Saracens of the Spanish March and the traders of Christendom. They trafficked with the East from Narbonne and Marseilles. Their quarter at Lyons, unlike the miserable ghettos of most continental cities, united with marvellous skill and beauty the architecture of the East and West; and their Rabbins established public schools at Carcassone, Montpelier, and Nismes, which rivalled those opened under Charlemagne himself by Alcuin of England, Clement of Ireland, and Theodulph of Germany.† Isaac the Jew twice conducted a mission from the court of Aix-la-Chapelle to that of Bagdad; andt he monkish chroniclers fail not to detail the curious and costly offerings (among them, the keys of the Holy Sepulchre) entrusted to him for the Emperor of the West by the great Haroun al Raschid. Another Jew, the physician Zedekiah, was the chief adviser of Louis le Debonnaire; and throughout his reign, and that of Charles the Bald, there was one law for the Hebrew and the Christian subject. Agobard, bishop of Lyons, found complaints to his sovereign and denunciations in the church alike ineffectual to bring down the Jews from their high estate, till the distractions of the empire under the later Carlovingians deprived them of their royal patronage, and bowed their necks beneath the feudal yoke of those numberless petty princes who substituted the dominion of their own will for law, and chose to enrich themselves by the plunder and massacre rather than by the tribute and protection of the Jews. Then began evil days for the house of Israel. The whole world was at war with them. The Roman hierarchy and the feudal society united to annihilate their civil and re ligious liberties; and the church encouraged the people, no less than the people supported the church, to bring charges against them of all possible and impossible kinds.* In times of national calamities or political catastrophes they were ever the guilty causes. To correspond with the infidels, as their fellow enemies to the cross of Christ, to poison the wells, and even the rivers, or by other fatal secrets only known to them to cause pestilence and famine ;t to obtain possession of the consecrated host by theft or bribery, and submit it to shameful insult; or, as we have seen already, to decoy Christian children to their homes, and there crucify them ;§-these are a few, and only a few, of the charges which France, in common with the whole world of the West, brought against the people which God had placed as a living image of the East in the midst of Christendom. At Toulouse it was customary to give a blow on the face to a Jew on every anniversary of the Passion. At Beziers, the usage prevailed of attacking the Jews' houses from Palm Sunday to Easter; and the faithful were regularly stirred up by a sermon from the bishop to celebrate in this manner the holy week. At Puy, in all disputes between Jews, the choristers of the cathedral were the umpires, "to the end that the great innocence of the judges might correct the great roguery of the litigants."** Provence and in Burgundy they were prohibited the use of the public baths, except on Fridays, when they were open to them in common with mountebanks and persons of ill fame.†† And yet in the south of France their condition was far better than in the north, where the Capetian monarchs earlier ob *The Jew, introduced in Abelard's dialogue concerning the supreme good, "inter philosophum, Judæum, et Chris tianum," observes, in drawing a lively picture of the wretched condition of the Jews, "Unde nobis præcipue superest lucrum, ut alienegenis fœnerantes hinc miseram sustentemus vitam, quod nos quidem maxime ipsis effecit invidiosos, qui se in hoc plurimum arbitrantur gravatos." +"Suadente diabolo " (leprosos)" per ministerium Judæorum . . . ut Christiani omnes morerentur, vel omnes uniformiter leprosi efficerentur." Cont. G. de Nangis, ann. 1321. + Ex. gr. The miraculous wafer at St. Gudule, in Brussels, still exhibited annually on the 15th of July. § See the ballads published by M. Michel. Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, 227) preserves the fact, that one of the earliest calumnies of the Jews against the Christians was, that they killed a pagan child in order In to dip in his blood the bread of the sacrament. There was retribution in the charge by the Christians against the Jews. To this day, in the East, whenever the pious Moslem wishes to persecute the wealthy Jew, the cry of childmurder is raised. Secret rites in all ages have rendered these stories credible; for as heresy is a question of opinion, and too subtle for mobs, social crimes which they can understand serve the purpose of inflaming their passions. "Omne ignotum pro nefando." Vaissette, Hist. de Languedoc, tom. ii. p. 151. Vaissette, Hist. de Languedoc, tom. ii. p. 485. But we learn from Castel (Memoires du Languedoc, L. iii. p. 523) that they purchased exemption from this in 1160. ** Michelet, Hist. de France, L. iv. C. 6. Note. ++ Michaud, Histoire des Croisades, tom. ii. p. 598. tained real power, and were able to enforce in person edicts of extortion or expulsion. During the first crusades, the king and the Jew profited together from the absence and poverty of the baronial holders of fiefs, who either made their lands over to them for prices far below their value in order to obtain the equipment for a journey to seek a new home-often a grave-in Palestine; or by their absence or death caused their remaining territorial possessions to revert to the king as suzerain, or to the Jew as mortgagee.* In this way those that tarried at home divided the spoil, till at the commencement of the reign of Philip Augustus the Jews had a claim on almost all the estates in the country and half of Paris; and that able and unscrupulous monarch considered himself called upon to assert his authority as more than a nominal king. The arm which was to deal such heavy blows on rebellious barons and disloyal churchmen tried its maiden strength on the Hebrew community. A royal edict in A.D. 1181 confiscated their movables, and commanded them to sell their immovables and depart from the kingdom-that is, from the north of France; for south of the Loire the edicts of the king at Paris were as yet but little respected. But though Philip Dieu-donné might thus wipe away the national debt, and with the assent and even approbation of all classes banish from the country of the Langue d'oyl those whom the more heretical land of the Langue d'oc covertly favoured, yet he could not for long do without these universal bankers of the civilized world, who by their national and commercial cohesion formed a secret monetary league, whose ramifications extended throughout Europe. In A.D. 1198 he was fain to invite them back to the north of France; and this people, patiens quia æternus, returned to this inhospitable kingdom, though to be fettered by new laws to lower the rate of interest and regulate the standard of money. The short reign of Louis VIII. was signalised by still severer decrees, annulling all future interests on debts due to Jews, and commanding the payment of the capital in three years in three separate instalments. Similar enactments were promulgated in the first years of his son-yet that son was St. Louis. It may seem strange to us that a man, at once so wise, and just, and holy, should enact, "Les meubles aux Juifs sont au It is curious to see how seldom the Jews in Palestine are noticed by the Crusaders; perhaps from the indiscriminating destruction of all the inhabitants found there by the soldiers of the Cross. Benjamin of Tudela (A.D. 1160-A.D. 1173) found only 400 Jews at Tyre, 200 at Jerusalem, 153 at Ascalon, 50 at Tiberias, all living in great poverty and meanness. Yet, though the Holy Land was almost a desert, it is affecting to read the indications of devoted attach. ment to its air and soil found in mediæval Jewish writings. |