Beside Erasmus stands Luther. He also combined intellectual attainments with spiritual aims. But the one figure faces the Renaissance; the other the Reformation road. Erasmus, while ridiculing in elegant satire the superstitions of the day, the malpractices of sordid priests, and the excesses of merry friars, shrinks from a breach with the Holy See. Much as he would like to see Catholicism reconciled to commonsense, he recoils with horror before the stakes and the scaffolds of the Holy Office. He could agree with Luther on many points, and yet write: “Even if Luther had spoken everything in the most unobjectionable manner, I had no inclination to die for the sake of Truth.” “Let others affect martyrdom,” he says elsewhere: “for myself I am unworthy of the honour.” Martin Luther was made of sterner stuff and simpler. Though he joined forces with the apostles of culture, he was determined to go much further than they in one direction, not as far in another. The alliance between Literature and Reform, between the two brothers Reason and Conscience, between the Southern and the Northern Ideals, could not last long. The free and cheerful element in Luther’s temperament, and his literary tastes, prevented a definite rupture in his own time. But under his successors the difference between the two sides became too wide for co-operation. Reason and laughter marched one way. Conscience and gloom the other. We have already seen that the sons of exiled Israel reaped but scant comfort from the triumph of Liberty’s elder offspring. We shall now proceed to show what the victory of the other brought to them. Martin Luther in his _Table-Talk_ gives a full and vivid description of the German Jews in his day. He tells us that their footsteps are to be found throughout Germany. In Saxony many names of places speak of them: Ziman, Damen, Resen, Sygretz, Schvitz, Pratha, Thablon.[84] At Frankfort-on-the-Maine they are extremely numerous: “They have a whole street to themselves of which every house is filled with them. They are compelled to wear little yellow rings on their coats, thereby to be known; they have no houses or grounds of their own, only furniture; and, indeed, they can only lend money upon houses or grounds at great hasard.”[85] “They are not permitted to keep or trade in cattle; their main occupations being brokage and usury.”[86] But this does not exhaust the list of oppression: “A rich Jew, on his death bed, ordered that his remains should be conveyed to Ratisbon. His friends, knowing that even the corpse of a Jew could not travel without paying heavy toll, devised the expedient of packing the carcase in a barrel of wine, which they then forwarded in the ordinary way. The waggoners, not knowing what lay within, tapped the barrel, and swilled away right joyously, till they found out they had been drinking Jew’s pickle. How it fared with them you may imagine.”[87]