compelled to receive the sacrament of baptism,” the bodies of the more obstinate tortured, and their fortunes confiscated; and yet—­a remarkable instance of inconsistency—­they were not permitted to leave Spain; and this species of persecution continued from 600 downwards.  Once or twice edicts of expulsion were issued, but speedily recalled; the tyrants being unwilling to dismiss victims whom they delighted to torture, or deprive themselves of industrious slaves over whom they might exercise a lucrative oppression; and a statute was enacted, “that the Jews who had been baptized should be constrained, for the honor of the church, to persevere in the external practice of a religion which they inwardly disbelieved and detested."[B]

[Footnote A:  Basnage asserts that the Jews were introduced into Spain by the fleet of Soloman, and the arms of Nebuchadnezzar, and that Hadrian transported forty thousand families of the tribe of Judah, and ten thousand of the tribe of Benjamin, etc.]

[Footnote B:  “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,” vol. 6, chap. xxxvii, from which all the previous sentences in inverted commas have been extracted.]

How, then, can compelled obedience to this statute be termed hypocrisy?  Persecution, privation, tyranny, may torture and destroy the body, but they cannot force the mind to the adoption of, and belief in tenets, from which the very treatment they commanded must urge it to revolt.  Of the 90,000 Jews forcibly baptized by order of Sisebut, and constrained to the external profession of Catholicism, not ten, in all probability, became actually Christians.  And yet how would it have availed them to relapse into the public profession of the faith they so obeyed and loved in secret?  To leave the country was utterly impossible.  It is easy to talk now of such proceedings being their right course of acting, when every land is open to the departure and entrance of every creed; but it was widely different then, and, even if they could have quitted Spain, there was not a spot of ground, in the whole European and Asiatic world, where persecution, extortion, and banishment would not equally have been their doom.  Constant relapses into external as well as internal Judaism, there were, but they were but the signal for increased misery to the whole nation; and by degrees they ceased.  It was from the forcible baptism of the 90,000 Hebrews, by Sisebut, that we may trace the origin of the secret Jews.  From father to son, from mother to daughter, the solemn secret descended, and gradually spread, still in its inviolable nature, through every rank and every profession, from the highest priest to the lowest friar, the general to the common soldier, the noble to the peasant, over the whole land.  There were indeed some few in Spain, before the final edict of expulsion in 1492, who were Hebrews in external profession as well as internal observance; but their condition was so degraded,