However, though three centuries of humanism had not been altogether wasted, the philosopher is in theory as hostile to the poor Jew as Luther himself: “The Jews of the lower orders,” he tells us, “are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation.” Nor was this prejudiced view of the race softened in Coleridge by his profound admiration for its literature, any more than it was in Luther. The latter was an enthusiastic admirer of the Psalms--the book that has played a larger part in men’s lives than any other--and so was Coleridge: “Mr. Coleridge, like so many of the elder divines of the Christian Church, had an affectionate reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of the Book of Psalms. He told me that, after having studied every page of the Bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of Scripture come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities.”[147] But Coleridge’s affection for ancient Hebrew literature deepened, if anything, his contempt for the modern Jew. He called Isaiah “his ideal of the Hebrew prophet,” and used this ideal as a means of emphasising his scorn for the actual: “The two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term are, I think, Isaiah--‘Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!’--and Levi of Holywell Street--‘Old clothes!’--both of them Jews, you’ll observe. _Immane quantum discrepant!_”[148] The philosopher does not deign to reflect on the possible causes of this lamentable discrepancy. Again, Coleridge, like Luther, delighted in clandestine conversion. He was on friendly terms with several learned Jews, and, finding them men of a metaphysical turn of mind, he liked, as was his wont, to preach to them “earnestly and also hopelessly” on Kant’s text regarding the “object” and “subject,” and other things weighty, though incomprehensible. At one time he was engaged in undermining the faith of four different victims of his zeal and friendship, or may be of his sense of humour: a Jew, a Swedenborgian, a Roman Catholic, and a New Jerusalemite. “He said he had made most way with the disciple of Swedenborg, who might be considered as convert, that he had perplexed the Jew, and had put the Roman Catholic into a bad humour; but that upon the New Jerusalemite he had made no more impression than if he had been arguing with the man in the moon.”[149]