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These would-be converts, hearing the rumors anent Uriel Acosta, bethought themselves of asking his advice. When the House of Judgment heard that he had bidden them beware of the intolerable yoke of the Rabbis, its members felt that this was too much. Uriel Acosta was again excommunicated. And now began new years of persecution, more grievous, more determined than ever.
He relates that, one day, in November 1582, while he was engaged in fervent prayer, the window of his museum looking towards the west suddenly glowed with a dazzling light, in the midst of which, in all his glory, stood the great angel Uriel. The following account of it is given in the Supplement to Granger's "Biographical History."
The celestial Throne is surrounded by four angels: to the right Michael, in front Gabriel, to the left Uriel, and to the rear Raphael. To these four angels corresponded the four tribes of Reuben, Judah, Dan, and Ephraim, the standard bearers.
I think if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture. It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object.
And once on a moonless midnight, when the venerable Dona Acosta had passed away, the watchman in the Jews' cemetery, stealing from his turret at a suspicious noise, turned his lantern upon no body-snatcher, but O more nefarious spectacle! the sobbing figure of Uriel Acosta across a new-dug grave, polluting the holy soil of the Beth-Chayim!
How he must have suffered to lose his beautiful wife! There were days on which Joseph's business or pleasure took him past his brother's house, though he always walked on the further side, and Uriel now set himself to keep watch at his study window from morning to night, the pair of Dutch mirrors fixed slantingly outside the window enabling him to see all the street life without being seen.
A very sober discreet person, of virtuous life and conversation, was beyond measure desirous to see something in this nature. Sir Robert Holborn, Knight, brought once unto me Gladwell of Suffolk, who had formerly had sight and conference with Uriel and Raphael, but lost them both by carelessness; so that neither of them both would but rarely appear, and then presently be gone, resolving nothing.
Uriel consented to the penance, scarcely knowing what they asked of him. Anything rather than another day of loneliness; so into the great synagogue, densely filled with men and women, the penitent was led, clothed in a black mourning garb and holding a black candle.
I claim no clear Uriel vision, now and then I stumble and grope; but at least I try to keep my little lamp trimmed, and I am not so blind as some, who reel and stagger in the Maremme of crime and fashionable vice.
Never had he wavered under persecution like Uriel Acosta at whose grave in unholy ground he had stood when a boy of eight, but had it not wrought insidiously upon his spirit? "Alas!" thought he, "the heaviest burden that men can lay upon us, is not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but that they thus plant hatred and scorn in our souls.
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