Or, there’s Satan!--one might venture Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave Such a flaw in the indenture As he’d miss till, past retrieve, Blasted lay that rose-acacia We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine. . . ‘St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratia Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r--you swine!
-- St. 9. Hy, Zy, Hine: represent the sound of the vesper bell.
On which the Jews were forced to attend an Annual Christian Sermon in Rome.
-- * “By a bull of Gregory XIII. in the year 1584, all Jews above the age of twelve years were compelled to listen every week to a sermon from a Christian priest; usually an exposition of some passages of the Old Testament, and especially those relating to the Messiah, from the Christian point of view. This burden is not yet wholly removed from them; and to this day, several times in the course of a year, a Jewish congregation is gathered together in the church of S. Angelo in Pescheria, and constrained to listen to a homily from a Dominican friar, to whom, unless his zeal have eaten up his good feelings and his good taste, the ceremony must be as painful as to his hearers. In the same spirit of vulgar persecution, there is upon the gable of a church, opposite one of the gates of the Ghetto, a fresco painting of the Crucifixion, and, underneath, an inscription in Hebrew and Latin, from the 2d and 3d verses of the 65th chapter of Isaiah-- ‘I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people, which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts; a people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face.’” --George S. Hillard’s Six Months in Italy. (1853.) --
{ "Now was come about Holy-Cross Day, and now must my lord preach his first sermon to the Jews: as it was of old cared for in the merciful bowels of the Church, that, so to speak, a crumb, at least, from her conspicuous table here in Rome, should be, though but once yearly, cast to the famishing dogs, under-trampled and bespitten-upon beneath the feet of the guests. And a moving sight in truth, this, of so many of the besotted blind restif and ready-to-perish Hebrews! now maternally brought --nay (for He saith, ‘Compel them to come in’), haled, as it were, by the head and hair, and against their obstinate hearts, to partake of the heavenly grace. What awakening, what striving with tears, what working of a yeasty conscience! Nor was my lord wanting to himself on so apt an occasion; witness the abundance of conversions which did incontinently reward him: though not to my lord be altogether the glory.”--Diary by the Bishop’s Secretary, 1600.}