When persecution began to work, "90,000 Jews were 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.