"And they shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God."—Luke xiii. 29.
Truly, "the things that ye fear they shall come upon you." How does it seem possible to fear a good thing! Yet, from earliest childhood, a great fear was upon me that ultimately I would accept Christianity,—not because I saw anything more worthy of emulation in the so-called Christian than in the Jew, but from sheer love of the words and deeds of the blessed Master, which it never entered my mind to doubt, although (to sense) born of strictly orthodox Jewish parents.
As young Jewish children are not supposed to read the New Testament, nor even a childish tale in which the name of Jesus is mentioned, the fact that I made myself an exception to this rule, I regard now in the light of a direct spiritual leading. "Seek and ye shall find;" but, as a renegade from Judaism is held in great abhorrence, and often mourned for as dead, it can easily be understood how any one contemplating such a step would be filled with a superstitious dread of consequences.
