the prophets declare.”[110] Luther in these passages, and passages like these, repeats all the well-worn arguments with which Christians from the earliest times strove to persuade the Jews that the Messiah had come. He insists that “the Law of Moses continued but for a while, therefore it must be abolished”; that “the circumcision was to continue but for a while, until the Messiah came; when he came, the commandment was at an end,” superseded by “the circumcision of the heart”;[111] that it was faith and not works that justified Abraham,[112] and so forth. But the Jews answered Luther’s arguments, as their fathers had answered the arguments of Justin Martyr, of Tertullian, and of other ancient authorities, and the arguments of the Dominican friars: “The covenant of the circumcision given before Moses’ time, and made between God and Abraham and his seed Isaac in his generation, they say, must and shall be an everlasting covenant, which they will not suffer to be taken from them.”[113] Luther’s eloquence, or perhaps his power to protect them, occasionally prevailed with the Jews. He tells us that the two Rabbis, Schamaria and Jacob, who went to him at Wittenberg to solicit a safe conduct, “struck to the heart, silenced and convinced, forsook their errors, became converts, and the day following, in the presence of the whole university at Wittenberg, were baptized Christians.”[114] The long sufferings of the race, and the ever deferred fulfilment of the hope of redemption, sometimes produced heartsickness and despair: “In 1537, when I was at Frankfurt, a great rabbi said to me, ‘My father had read very much, and waited for the coming of the Messiah, but at last he fainted, and out of hope said: As our Messiah has not come in fifteen hundred years, most certainly Christ Jesus must be he.’”[115] And again, “A Jew came to me at Wittenberg, and said: He was desirous to be baptized, and made a Christian, but that he would first go to Rome to see the chief head of Christendom. From this intention myself, Philip Melanchthon, and other divines laboured to dissuade him, fearing lest, when he witnessed the offences and knaveries at Rome, he might be scared from Christendom. But the Jew went to Rome, and when he had sufficiently seen the abominations acted there he returned to us again, desiring to be baptized, and said: ‘Now I will willingly worship the God of the Christians, for he is a patient God. If he can endure such wickedness and villainy as is done at Rome, he can suffer and endure all the vices and knaveries of the world.’”[116]