afterwards to be able to boast of having been merciful, and of having helped the devil and his progeny to blaspheme our dear Lord.”[945] The last clause would appear to have been aimed at the Counts of Mansfeld, who had allowed a large number of Jews to settle in Eisleben, Luther’s birthplace. The temporal happiness which the Jews looked for under the reign of their Messias, Luther graphically compares to the felicity of a sow: “For the sow lies as it were on a feather-bed whether in the street or on the manure-heap; she rests secure, grunts contentedly, sleeps soundly, fears neither lord nor king, neither death nor hell, neither devil nor Divine anger.... She has no thought of death until it is upon her.... Of what use would the Jews’ Messias be to me if he could not help poor me against this great and horrible dread and misfortune [the fear of death], nor make my life a tenth part as happy as that of the sow? I would much rather say: Dear God Almighty, keep Your Messias for Yourself, or give him to those who want him; as for me, change me into a sow. For it is better to be a live pig than a man who is everlastingly dying.”[946] Such passages as the above are frequently to be met with in Luther’s writings against the Jews. In them his object plainly was to confute the misinterpretation of the Bible and the scoffing objections to which Jewish scholars were given. Yet so utterly ungovernable was the author’s passion that it spoiled the execution of his noble task. He scarcely knew how to conduct a controversy without introducing sows, devils and such like. Was it really to Luther’s credit that the sty should loom so large in his struggle with his foes? Duke George he scolds as the “Dresden pig,” and Dr. Eck as “Pig-Eck”; the latter Luther promises to answer in such a way “that the sow’s belly shall not be too much inflated.”[947] The Bishops of the Council of Constance who burnt Hus are “boars”; the “bristles of their backs rise on end and they whet their snouts.”[948] Erasmus “carries within him a sow from the herd of Epicurus.”[949] The learned Catholics of the Universities are hogs and donkeys decked out in finery, whom God has sent to punish us; these “devils’ masks, the monks and learned spectres, from the Schools we have endowed with such huge wealth, many of the doctors, preachers, masters, priests and friars are big, coarse, corpulent donkeys, decked out with hoods red and brown, like the market sow in her glass beads and tinsel chains.”[950]