Reb Shemayah at once felt that this visit betokened something unusual. He had often met and conversed with the priest and the burgomaster, singly and together; the one and the other had also been casually within his four walls, but neither had ever visited him formally, and this special visit by the two leading men of the village together he knew must have some particular and unusual reason. He at once determined to reflect ripely on whatever proposition they should make him, and to act upon it in accordance with his best judgment and wisdom. He rose and received them with great politeness; and after they had seated themselves, in accordance with his request, he inquired to what he owed the distinguished honor of their visit. The priest, in view of the deference due to his holy calling, acted as spokesman and explained the mission which had brought them thither.
“We have come, dear Reb Shemayah,” he said, “as a deputation from the church and secular community of Nordheim, to show you how free from prejudice or bigotry our village is, and in particular how greatly we love and honor you. You know, of course, that it is a fixed rule with us never to confer any of the honors connected with the rites and ceremonies of our holy church upon any one but a true believer, in full communion with and good standing in the church; but so greatly do we love and esteem you that we have resolved for your sake to depart from this time-honored and otherwise invariable rule, and to honor you as greatly as we would the best of our true Christian burghers. We have therefore come as a delegation to inform you that you have been selected for the high and solemn office of bearing the Holy Image at the great procession of ——mas next, and at the same time to congratulate you upon this rare honor, which has never yet been attained by any Jew.” Reb Shemayah listened to this smooth speech with external calmness, but with the most violent internal agitation. The priest had understood well his true feelings. His very blood ran cold at the thought of the proffered _honor_(?). What! he, the scion of a long line of martyrs who had died at the stake rather than prove recreant to the command thundered forth amid Sinai’s flames, “Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, or any likeness of anything which is in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters beneath the earth; thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them”; from whose dying lips had issued the cry, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”—he should march in the procession of an alien cult and himself bear an image for the idolatrous adoration of the multitude! He felt his very soul sicken at the thought. But his keen mind and his shrewd, intuitive perception of the fitness of things helped him out of his difficulty. He missed the note of sincerity in the priest’s smooth words; he noticed that neither his demeanor nor that of his companion, the burgomaster, was exactly such as is characteristic of persons desiring to confer honor upon another; besides, he knew full well how utterly contrary to all Catholic rule and precedent it was to permit heretics to participate in church ceremonials, and he could not conceive that an exception should be made for him, and in a flash the whole devious machinations were revealed to him, and he realized that it was only a cunningly thought-out plot to extort money from him as the price of exemption. He resolved to baffle the ingenious scheme with equal ingenuity, and to give the plotters no opportunity to narrate later on, with vociferous hilarity, how shrewdly they had victimized and blackmailed the Jew. His first step was to express his sense of unworthiness of the proffered honor. “I feel greatly honored, indeed,” he said, “by this proof of the esteem in which my fellow-burghers hold me; but how can I accept such a distinction? I am only a young citizen. There are others, older and better known than I; besides I am not even of your faith. I am a Jew whom you deem an unbeliever; and how, then, can I aspire to an honor which should be conferred only upon a true and undoubted co-religionist of your own?”