Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/213

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MARRIAGE EMBASSY TO HUNGARY
209

obligation. By these methods he introduces into his negotiations an accuracy of estimate and of legal principle that his more confused and ignorant Christian competitor cannot even comprehend. He asserts a legal contract, and he is answered with a prayer to heaven; he insists on his recompense for his money, and he hears an appeal to catechism; he relies on business exactitude, and he confronts an ejaculation to a saint. The Christian is of purpose left in his ignorance that his imagination may be inflated. He trusts to heavenly intervention when the Jew trusts to his mortgage; and when the mortgage presses hard, the Christian accuses the Jew of intimacy with Satan. In this hour magic means mercantile knowledge, legal strictness, skill in language and precision of formalities. While the Christian at once alarms and incapacitates himself by brooding over the fictitious terrors of the unseen world, and blends his intellect with his imagination, so that every event, and every detail of each is attributed to some angelic or satanic agency, and means to ends are totally neglected, the Jew studies interest and discount, he frames sales and purchases in strictly legal phraseology, he studies legal positions, and the intricacies of judicial wile; and as an imagination, however fervid, cannot dream away a mortmain, or dull the edge of a legal maxim, the Christian finds himself confronted with perplexities that his ignorance and his chagrin attribute to the venom of sorcery, and the magic diablery of the great fiend. I fearlessly assert that priests and doctors will not per-