Page:Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing.djvu/32

made a formal confession of their secret and most sinful loyalty to the religion of Jesus and of the Prophets. The King graciously obtained papal absolution for their heinous crime, and they were dismissed—alive, it is true, but wrecked in health by torture, and robbed of their possessions by Catholic king and holy priests. Joseph ben Israel naturally fled, at the very first opportunity, with his wife and their infant son Manasseh. They went to Amsterdam, where Manasseh lived nearly all his life. He succeeded his teacher, Rabbi Uzziel, as Rabbi of the second Amsterdam Synagogue (the Habitation of Peace) in 1622, when he was barely eighteen years old; started a Hebrew printing-house about the year 1627; and in 1640 he was about to emigrate to Brazil when he received an important appointment in the senior department of the Amsterdam Jewish School, where Spinoza must have come under his influence. Manasseh was not a great thinker, but he was a great reader, and made up in breadth of outlook for what he lacked in depth of insight. Like so many contemporary theologians he was inclined towards mysticism, it is true, but there was a touch of romance in his character, and, urged by an irresistible yearning to help his suffering brethren, his very mysticism with all its puerilities played a useful part: it prompted him to schemes which may indeed appear quixotic, which certainly brought his life to an untimely end, but which bore fruit nevertheless, and were well adapted to bear fruit in an age in which religion and superstition, the flame and the smoke, were so curiously intermingled. What he conceived to be the mission of his life is indicated in the Biblical verse with which he headed the dedication of his Hope of Israel (1650. The book, it is interesting to observe, was dedicated to Spinoza's father and the other Wardens of the Jewish school. At the head of the dedication is the first verse from Isaiah xli.: To preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted.