He put himself in the place of a ruler in whose lands the Jews blasphemed Christianity and exclaimed: “I would summon all the Jews and ask them,” whether they could prove their insulting assertions. “If they could, I would give them a thousand florins; if not I would have their tongues torn out by the root. In short, we ought not to suffer Jews to live amongst us, nor eat or drink with them.”[223]—“They are a shameful people,” he says on another occasion, “they swallow up everything with their usury; where they give a gentleman a thousand florins, they suck twenty thousand out of his poor underlings.”[224] The demands with which his anger against the Jews inspires him found only too strong an echo amongst his followers. “It would be well,” wrote the Lutheran preacher Jodokus Ehrhardt in 1558, after complaining of the usury of the Jews, “if in all places they were proceeded with as Father Luther advised and enjoined when, amongst other things, he wrote: ‘Let their synagogues and schools be set on fire … and let who can throw brimstone.… Refuse them safe conduct and all freedom to travel. Let all their ready money and treasures of gold and silver, etc., be taken from them,’ etc. Such faithful counsels and regulations were given by our divinely enlightened Luther.”[225] After all that has been said it would be very rash to apply to Luther’s attitude towards the different callings and professions the words which St. Paul wrote of himself when considering humanity as a whole, i.e. of the power of God by which he had striven with endless patience and charity to bring home the Gospel to both Jew and Greek: “To the Greeks and to the barbarians, to the wise and to the foolish I am a debtor.” “I have become all things to all men in order to save all.” _The Merchant Class_ The opening up of many previously unknown countries, the discovery of new trade routes, and the new industries called forth by new inventions brought about a sudden and quite unforeseen revival in trade and prosperity at the time of the religious schism. An alteration in the earlier ideas on political economy was bound to supervene. The upsetting of the mediæval notions which now could no longer hold and the uncertainty as to what to build on in future led to a deal of confusion in that period of transition. What was chiefly needed in the case of one anxious to judge of things from their ethical and social side was experience and knowledge of the world joined with prudence and the spirit of charity. Annoyance was out of place; what was called for was a capacity to weigh matters dispassionately.