Luther the rebel against the Church was one person; Luther the founder of a Church, another. While engaged in his duel with Rome, Martin Luther strove to secure the favour and assistance of the Humanists of his day. He took pains to represent the cause of Reform as being the cause of Reason. He described his friends as the friends of liberal culture, and his foes as the foes of light. He invited theological discussion, and professed himself ready to be guided in the interpretation of the Scriptures by pure reason. But when the struggle was over and the battle was won, the despotic character and inflexible dogmatism of the religious leader alienated many of his literary allies, Erasmus among them; while the same causes also estranged many of his religious sympathisers. Indeed, Luther’s bearing in the hour of his success seemed to lend colour to the assertion of his adversaries, that, had he been pope, instead of Leo X., he would have defended the Church against a much more formidable antagonist than the monk of Wittenberg. After all, a rebel often is only a tyrant out of power. Towards the Jews Luther’s conduct was the same as towards his fellow-Christians and fellow-rebels. At first he undertook to defend them against all the time-honoured prejudices of the Middle Ages. He denounced in no measured terms the un-Christian spirit of “silly theologians” and their insolence towards the Jews, and in 1523 he published a work under the startling title, _Jesus was born a Jew_; in which he declares, “Those fools the Papists, bishops, sophists, monks, have formerly so dealt with the Jews, that every good Christian would have rather been a Jew. And if I had been a Jew, and seen such stupidity and such blockheads reign in the Christian Church, I would rather be a pig than a Christian. They have treated the Jews as if they were dogs, not men, and as if they were fit for nothing but to be reviled. They are blood-relations of our Lord; therefore, if we respect flesh and blood, the Jews belong to Christ more than we. I beg, therefore; my dear Papists, if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that you begin to revile me as a Jew. “Therefore, it is my advice that we should treat them kindly but now we drive them by force, treating them deceitfully or ignominiously, saying they must have Christian blood to wash away the Jewish stain, and I know not what nonsense. Also we prohibit them from working amongst us, from living and having social intercourse with us, forcing them, if they would remain with us, to be usurers.”[92]