Messiah, Sabatai Sevi of Smyrna, arose in the Levant. He preached a
creed which was a first cousin of those believed in by our own
Anabaptists and Seventh Day Adventists. The name and the fame of him
spread across the Near East like fire in dry grass. Every ghetto in
Turkey had accepted him; his ritual was adopted by every synagogue; the
Jews gave themselves over to penance and preparation. For a year honesty
reigned in the Levant. Then the prophet set out for Constantinople to
beard the Sultan in his palace and, so he announced, to lead him in
chains to Zion. That was where Sabatai Sevi made his big mistake. For
the Commander of the Faithful was from Missouri, so far as Sabatai
Sevi's claims to divinity were concerned.

"Messiahs can perform miracles," the Sultan said. "Let me see you
perform one. My Janissaries shall make a target of you. If you are of
divine origin, as you claim, the arrows will not harm you. And, in any
event, it will be an interesting experiment."

[Illustration: THE ANCIENT WALLS OF SALONIKA

Before us we saw the yellow walls and crenellated towers of that city
where Paul preached to the Thessalonians]

Now Sabatai evidently had grave doubts about his self-assumed divinity
being arrow-proof, for he protested vigorously against the proposal to
make a human pin-cushion of him, whereupon the Sultan, his suspicions
now confirmed, gave him his choice between being impaled upon a stake, a
popular Turkish pastime of the period, or of renouncing Judaism and
accepting the faith of Islam. Preferring to be a live coward to an
impaled martyr, he chose the latter, yet such was his influence with
the Jews that thousands of his adherents voluntarily embraced the