Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/189

 Sigismund. When a Jew at the Emperor's court desired, with many prayers, to become a Christian, he was at last to baptism, and afterwards was tested, but prematurely and beyond his strength. For immediately after his baptism the Emperor had two fires built, calling the one the fire of the Christians, the other the fire of the Jews, and bade the Jew choose in which of them he preferred to be burned. "For," said he, "you are now baptized and holy, and it is hardly likely that you will ever become a better man than you now are." The miserable man showed that his faith was either pretended or weak by choosing the fire of the Jews; as a Jew he leaped into it, and as a Jew he burned. The story of the will of the baptized Jew of Cologne is also well known, and there are many others.

But I think the cause of this ill-repute is not so much the Jews' obstinancy and wickedness, as rather their absurd and asinine ignorance and the wicked and shameless life of popes, priests, monks and universities. They give the Jews not a single spark of light or warmth, either in doctrine or in life, but, on the contrary, they alienate the Jews' hearts and consciences by the darkness and the errors of their own traditions and by examples of the worst possible morals, and only impart to them the name of Christian, so that you may justly suppose that Christ's word was spoken to them, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, who compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves." They find fault with the Jews because they only pretend to be converted, but they do not find fault with themselves because they only pretend to convert them; nay, they seduce them from one error into another that is worse. What glory is it, pray, nay, what for a teacher if he gives a bright and promising boy only the most pestilential teaching, then shows him in his own life only the most corrupt morals, and afterwards washes his hands and says he learned nothing good from him? Thus a bawd may teach a girl to be a harlot and afterwards charge her with not living in virginity. That this is the way the Jews