All these sentiments, accompanied with suggestions for the suppression of the miserable people, were embodied by Luther in his published pamphlets.[121] The Reformer’s unmeasured hostility bears to the habitual tolerance of many popes the same relation as the mental horizon of the provincial monk does to the broader vision of the monarch of a great empire. If Luther, the genial and joyous, entertained so uncharitable feelings towards the Jews, it is not difficult to understand the attitude of his morose and narrower successors, armed as they were by the sanction of his example. It has been well said, “the opinions of a great man are a valuable possession and a ruinous inheritance.” The denunciations of Israel by the early Fathers of the Church had continued to dictate Christian intolerance through the ages, and their authority was quoted in support of the persecutions and massacres which sullied mediaeval Europe. Luther’s utterances exercised a similar influence over the Protestant world, both in his own and in after times, down to the present day. Protestant Germany took up the tale of persecution in the sixteenth century where Catholic Germany had left off in the fifteenth. The Jews were given the alternatives of baptism and banishment in Berlin, were expelled from Bavaria in 1553, from Brandenburg in 1573, and the tragedy of oppression was carried on through the ensuing centuries. How vigorously the plant of anti-Judaism continued to flourish in Germany may be seen from the following incident.