tumacy, their greed and avarice, which makes
their presence in any land a public calamity. Though their church and
state has long been overthrown, and they are a people without a country,
homeless wanderers on the face of the earth, they still boast of being
"the people of God," and are indulging the wildest dreams about the
reestablishment of their ancient kingdom. They are looking for a Messiah
who will be a secular prince, and will make them all barons living in
beautiful castles and receiving the tribute of the Goyim. One may reason
and plead with them and show them that their belief contradicts their
own Scriptures, that their Talmud is filled with palpable falsehoods,
and that their hope is a chimera; but they turn a deaf ear to argument
and entreaty, and turn upon you with fierce resentment at your efforts
to show them the truth. Although they know that their habits of grasping
and hoarding wealth, driving hard and unfair bargains, their hunting for
small profits by contemptible methods like hungry dogs searching the
offal in the alley, rouses the enmity of communities against them and
causes them to become a blight to all true progress, to honest trade and
business in any land where they have become firmly established, so that
laws must be made against them, still they blindly and passionately
continue their covetous strivings. When Luther observes the corrupting
influence of the Jews on the public life and morals, he declares that
they ought to be expelled from the country, and their synagogs ought to
be destroyed, that is, they have deserved this treatment. But it is a
remarkable fact that even in these terrible denunciations of the Jews
Luther moves on Bible ground, as any one can see that will examine his
exposition of an imprecatory psalm, like Psalm 109 and 59. If these
words of God mean anything and admit of any application to an apostate
and hardened race, the Jews are that race, and a teacher of the Bible
has the duty to point out this fact. But Luther has not been a
Jewbaiter; he has not incited a riot against then, nor headed a raid
upon them, as Prof. Worman tells us that Catholic priests in the Middle
Ages occasionally would do. What Luther thought of persecuting the Jews
for their religion can be seen from his exposition of Psalm 14. He did
not believe in a general conversion of the Jews, but he held that
individual Jews would ever and anon be won for Christ and would be
grafted on the olive-tree of