declared himself a follower of Hasidism. It was his mother who saved
him. He yielded to her prayers, and was held back from committing a
perilous act of heresy.

These internal conflicts between feeling and reason, the perplexities
with which his spirit wrestled, did not affect our author to an
excessive degree. They produced no radical change in his personality.
All his life Mapu remained the humble scholar of the ghetto, a successor
of the _Ebyonim_, of the psalmists and the prophets. Timorous,
melancholy, lacking all desire for the things connected with practical
life, often degraded by their own material wretchedness and by the
intellectual wretchedness of their surroundings, these dreamers of the
ghetto, more numerous than the outsider knows, hide a moral exaltation
in the depths of their hearts, a supreme idealism, always ready to do
battle, never conquered. In their persons we are offered the only
explanation there is for the activity and persistence of the Messianic
people.

Mapu was on the point of succumbing, like so many others, the darkness
of mysticism was about to drop like a pall upon his mind, when something
happened, insignificant in itself, but important through its
consequences, and he was snatched out of danger. A Latin psalter fell
into his hands by chance; it gave a fresh turn to his studies, and his
mind took its bearings anew.

Was it curiosity, or was it desire for knowledge, that impelled him to
decipher the sacred text in an unknown language at what cost soever? It
is certain that no difficulty affrighted him. Word by word he translated
the Latin text by dint of comparing it with the Hebrew original, and he
succeeded in acquiring a large number of Latin words. He is not alone in