The reputed proficiency of the Jews in the black art is another grievous offence in Luther’s eyes: “There are sorcerers among the Jews, who delight in tormenting Christians, for they hold us as dogs. Duke Albert of Saxony well punished one of these wretches. A Jew offered to sell him a talisman covered with strange characters, which he said effectually protected the wearer against any sword or dagger thrust. The Duke replied: ‘I will essay thy charm upon thyself, Jew,’ and, putting the talisman round the fellow’s neck, he drew his sword and passed it through his body. ‘Thou feelest, Jew!’ said he, ‘how it would have been with me had I purchased thy talisman?’”[106] The story contains several points of interest for the student of mediaeval Christianity, Luther’s own approbation of the Duke’s act being not the least interesting of them. Luther, the champion of spiritual freedom, could not forgive the Jews for differing from him in the interpretation of the Scriptures: “The Jews read our books, and thereout raise objections against us; ’tis a nation that scorns and blasphemes even as the lawyers, the Papists, and adversaries do, taking out of our writings the knowledge of our cause, and using the same as weapons against us.”[107] Yet the very tactics which Luther so ingenuously condemns in the Jews, lawyers, and Papists, he himself is the first to adopt. In his endeavours to convert the Jews he draws all his arguments, as others had done before him, from the Hebrew Bible: “I am persuaded if the Jews heard our preaching, and how we handle the Old Testament, many of them might be won, but, through disputing, they have become more and more stiff-necked, haughty, and presumptuous.”[108] And elsewhere: “I have studied the chief passages of Scripture that constitute the grounds upon which the Jews argue against us; as where God said to Abraham: ‘I will make my covenant between me and thee, and with thy seed after thee, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant....’ Here the Jews brag, as the Papists do upon the passage, ‘Thou art Peter.’ I would willingly bereave the Jews of this bragging by rejecting the Law of Moses, so that they should not be able to gainsay me. We have against them the prophet Jeremiah, where he says, ‘Behold, the time cometh, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not as the covenant which I made with their fathers.’...”[109] On another occasion he tries to refute the Jews by quoting Jeremiah’s prophecy “touching Christ: ‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous branch, and a King shall reign and prosper ... and this is the name whereby he shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness.’ This argument the Jews are not able to solve; yet, if they deny that this sentence is spoken of Christ, they must show unto us another King, descended from David, who should govern so long as the sun and moon endure, as the promises of