Missions to the Jews became the fashion of the day, and the kingdoms of the West were overrun by itinerant dialecticians seeking whom they might convert. The Jews were forced to attend church and to listen to sermons against their own religion. Thanks to their long training in Rabbinical subtleties, the benighted people sometimes proved more than a match for their assailants, and, if fair play were not contrary to the laws of ecclesiastical warfare, they might succeed in converting the would-be convertors. But, though religious discussion was invited, nay, forced by the Church, it was always on the clear understanding that the Christians might beat the Jews, but that the Jews should under no circumstances be allowed to beat the Christians. To prevent any misconception on the subject, Thomas Aquinas, justly celebrated as one of the least bigoted of theologians, and distinguished among schoolmen for his tolerance of Judaism, gravely cautioned his readers to have no intercourse with the Jews, unless they felt sure that their faith was proof against reason. In later years the work of conversion in the various countries was entrusted by the Popes to Dominican friars and inquisitors, who carried it on with a diligence never practised except by men fanatically believing in the truth of their doctrines and with a ruthlessness only possible in men too firmly persuaded of the holiness of the end to be scrupulous about the means. These apostles were authorised to reinforce the powers of their eloquence by an appeal to the secular arm. Even so modern missionaries in China have been known in time of peril to forget that an apostle should be above earthly weapons and “to clamour for a gunboat with which to ensure respect for the Gospel.”[53] And while disappointed theologians represented the Jew’s loyalty to his religion as a proof of his anti-Christian tendencies, scholars represented his aloofness as a proof of his anti-social nature, and they both agreed in denouncing him as “an enemy of mankind.” This lesson, to use the words of a distinguished Jewish writer, “was dinned into the ears of the masses until the calumny became part of the popular creed. The poets formulated the idea for the gentry, the friars brought it to the folk.”[54]