Life of Luther by Julius Koestlin

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We have a reference by Luther to the lessons he learned in childhood
from his experience of poverty at home, in his remarks in later
life, on the sons of poor men, who by sheer hard work raise
themselves from obscurity, and have much to endure, and no time to
strut and swagger, but must be humble and learn to be silent and to
trust in God, and to whom God also has given good sound heads.

As to Luther's relations with his brothers and sisters we have the
testimony of one who knew the household at Mansfeld, and
particularly his brother James, that from childhood they were those
of brotherly companionship, and that from his mother's own account
he had exercised a governing influence both by word and deed on the
good conduct of the younger members of the family.

His father must have taken him to school at a very early age. Long
after, in fact only two years before his death, he noted down in the
Bible of a 'good old friend,' Emler, a townsman of Mansfeld, his
recollection how, more than once, Emler, as the elder, had carried
him, still a weakly child, to and from school; a proof, not indeed,
as a Catholic opponent of the next century imagined, that it was
necessary to compel the boy to go to school, but that he was still
of an age to benefit by being carried. The school-house, of which
the lower portion still remains, stood at the upper end of the
little town, part of which runs with steep streets up the hill. The
children there were taught not only reading and writing, but also
the rudiments of Latin, though doubtless in a very clumsy and
mechanical fashion. From his experience of the teaching here, Luther
speaks in later years of the vexations and torments with declining
and conjugating and other tasks which school children in his youth
had to undergo. The severity he there met with from his teacher was
a very different thing from the strictness of his parents.
Schoolmasters, he says, in those days were tyrants and executioners,
the schools were prisons and hells, and in spite of blows,
trembling, fear, and misery, nothing was ever taught. He had been
whipped, he tells us, fifteen times one morning, without any fault
of his own, having been called on to repeat what he had never been
taught.

At this school he remained till he was fourteen, when his father
resolved to send him to a better and higher-class place of
education. He chose for that purpose Magdeburg; but what particular
school he attended is not known. His friend Mathesius tells us that
the town-school there was 'far renowned above many others.' Luther
himself says that he went to school with the Null-brethren. These
Null-brethren or Noll-brethren, as they were called, were a
brotherhood of pious clergymen and laymen, who had combined
together, but without taking any vows, to promote among themselves
the salvation of their souls and the practice of a godly life, and
to labour at the same time for the social and moral welfare of the
people, by preaching the Word of God, by instruction, and by
spiritual ministration. They undertook in particular the care of
youth. They were, moreover, the chief originators of the great
movement in Germany, at that time, for promoting intellectual
culture, and reviving the treasures of ancient Roman and Greek
literature. Since 1488 a colony of them had existed at Magdeburg,
which had come from Hildesheim, one of their head-quarters. As there
is no evidence of heir having had a school of their own at
Magdeburg, they may have devoted their services to the town-school.
Thither, then, Hans Luther sent his eldest son in 1497. The idea had
probably been suggested by Peter Reinicke, the overseer of the
mines, who had a son there. With this son John, who afterwards rose
to an important office in the mines at Mansfeld, Martin Luther
contracted a lifelong friendship. Hans, however, only let his son
remain one year at Magdeburg, and then sent him to school at
Eisenach. Whether he was induced to make this change by finding his
expectations of the school not sufficiently realised, or whether
other reasons, possibly those regarding a cheaper maintenance of his
son, may have determined him in the matter, there is no evidence to
show. What strikes one here only is his zeal for the better
education of his son.

Ratzeberger is the only one who tells us of an incident he heard of
Luther from his own lips, during his stay at Magdeburg, and this was
one which, as a physician, he relates with interest. Luther, it
happened, was lying sick of a burning fever, and tormented with
thirst, and in the heat of the fever they refused him drink. So one
Friday, when the people of the house had gone to church, and left
him alone, he, no longer able to endure the thirst, crawled off on
hands and feet to the kitchen, where he drank off with great avidity
a jug of cold water. He could reach his room again, but having done
so he fell into a deep sleep, and on waking the fever had left him.

The maintenance his father was able to afford him was not sufficient
to cover the expenses of his board and lodging as well as of his
schooling, either at Magdeburg or afterwards at Eisenach. He was
obliged to help himself after the manner of poor scholars, who, as
he tells us, went about from door to door collecting small gifts or
doles by singing hymns. 'I myself,' he says,' was one of those young
colts, particularly at Eisenach, my beloved town.' He would also
ramble about the neighbourhood with his school-fellows; and often,
from the pulpit or the lecturer's chair, would he tell little
anecdotes about those days. The boys used to sing quartettes at
Christmas-time in the villages, carols on the birth of the Holy
Child at Bethlehem. Once, as they were singing before the door of a
solitary farmhouse, the farmer came out and called to them roughly,
'Where are you, young rascals?' He had two large sausages in his
hand for them, but they ran away terrified, till he shouted after
them to come back and fetch the sausages. So intimidated, says
Luther, had he become by the terrors of school discipline. His
object, however, in relating this incident was to show his hearers
how the heart of man too often construes manifestations of God's
goodness and mercy into messages of fear, and how men should pray to
God perseveringly, and without timidity or shamefacedness. In those
days it was not rare to find even scholars of the better classes,
such as the son of a magistrate at Mansfeld, and those who, for the
sake of a better education, were sent to distant schools, seeking to
add to their means in the manner we have mentioned.

After this, his father sent him to Eisenach, bearing in mind the
numerous relatives who lived in the town and surrounding country,
and who might be of service to him. But of these no mention has
reached us, except of one, named Konrad, who was sacristan in the
church of St. Nicholas. The others, no doubt, were not in a position
to give him any material assistance.

About this time his singing brought him under the notice of one Frau
Cotta, who with genuine affection took up the promising boy, and
whose memory, in connection with the great Reformer, still lives in
the hearts of the German people. Her husband, Konrad or Kunz, was
one of the most influential citizens of the town, and sprang from a
noble Italian family who had acquired wealth by commerce. Ursula
Cotta, as her name was, belonged to the Eisenach family of Schalbe.
She died in 1511. Mathesius tells us how the boy won her heart by
his singing and his earnestness in prayer, and she welcomed him to
her own table. Luther met with similar acts of kindness from a
brother or other relative of hers, and also from an institution
belonging to Franciscan friars at Eisenach, which was indebted to
the Schalbe family for several rich endowments, and was named, in
consequence, the Schalbe College. At Frau Cotta's, Luther was first
introduced to the life in a patrician's house, and learned to move
in that society.

At Eisenach he remained at school for four years. Many years
afterwards we find him on terms of friendly and grateful intercourse
with one Father Wiegand, who had been his schoolmaster there.
Ratzeberger, speaking of the then schoolmaster at Eisenach, mentions
a 'distinguished poet and man of learning, John Trebonius,' who, as
he tells us, every morning, on entering the schoolroom, would take
off his biretta, because God might have chosen many a one of the
lads present to be a future mayor, or chancellor, or learned doctor;
a thought which, as he adds, was amply realised afterwards in the
person of Doctor Luther. The relations of these two at the school,
which contained several classes, must be a matter of conjecture. But
the system of teaching pursued there was praised afterwards by
Luther himself to Melancthon. The former acquired there that
thorough knowledge of Latin which was then the chief preparation for
University study. He learned to write it, not only in prose, but
also in verse, which leads us to suppose that the school at Eisenach
took a part in the Humanistic movement already mentioned. Happily,
his active mind and quick understanding had already begun to
develop; not only did he make up for lost ground, but he even
outstripped those of his own age.

As we see him growing up to manhood, the future hero of the faith,
the teacher, and the warrior, the most important question for us is
the course which his religious development took from childhood.

He who, in after years, waged such a tremendous warfare with the
Church of his time, always gratefully acknowledged, and in his own
teaching and conduct kept steadily in view, how, within herself, and
underneath all the corruptions he denounced, she still preserved the
groundwork of a Christian life, the charter of salvation, the
fundamental truths of Christianity, and the means of redemption and
blessing, vouchsafed by the grace of God. Especially did he
acknowledge all that he had himself received from the Church since
childhood. In that House, he says on one occasion, he was baptised,
and catechised in the Christian truth, and for that reason he would
always honour it as the House of his Father. The Church would at any
rate take care that children, at home and at school, should learn by
heart the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten
Commandments; that they should pray, and sing psalms and Christian
hymns. Printed books, containing them, were already in existence.
Among the old Christian hymns in the German language, of which a
surprisingly rich collection has been formed, a certain number, at
least, were in common use in the churches, especially for festivals.
'Fine songs' Luther called them, and he took care that they should
live on in the Evangelical communities. Those old verses form in
part the foundation of the hymns which we owe to his own poetical
genius. Thus for Christmas we still have the carol of those times,
_Ein Kindelein so lobelich_; and the first verse of Luther's
Whitsun hymn, _Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist_, is taken, he
tells us, from one of those old-fashioned melodies. Of the portions
of Scripture read in church, the Gospels and Epistles were given in
the mother-tongue. Sermons, also, had long been preached in German,
and there were printed collections of them for the use of the
clergy.

The places where Luther grew up were certainly better off in this
respect than many others. For, in the main, very much was still
wanting to realise what had been recommended and striven for by
pious Churchmen, and writers and religious fraternities, or even
enjoined by the Church herself. The Reformers had, indeed, a heavy
and an irrefutable indictment to bring against the Catholic Church
system of their time. The grossest ignorance and shortcomings were
exposed by the Visitations which they undertook, and from these we
may fairly judge of the actual state of things existing for many
years before. It appeared, that even where these portions of the
catechism were taught by parents and schoolmasters, they never
formed the subject of clerical instruction to the young. It was
precisely one of the charges brought against the enemies of the
Reformation, that, notwithstanding the injunctions of their Church,
they habitually neglected this instruction, and preferred teaching
the children such things as carrying banners in processions and holy
tapers. Priests were found, in the course of these visitations, who
had scarcely any knowledge of the chief articles of the faith. His
own personal experience of this neglect, when young, is not noticed
by Luther in his later complaints on the subject.

But the main fault and failing which he recognised in after life,
and which, as he tells us, was a source of inward suffering to him
from childhood, was the distorted view, held up to him at school and
from the pulpit, of the conditions of Christian salvation, and,
consequently, of his own proper religious attitude and demeanour.

Luther himself, as we learn from him later life, would have
Christian children brought up in the happy assurance that God is a
loving Father, Christ a faithful Saviour, and that it is their
privilege and duty to approach their Father with frank and childlike
confidence, and, if aroused to a consciousness of sin or wrong, to
entreat at once His forgiveness. Such however, he tells us, was not
what he was taught. On the contrary, he was instructed, and trained
up from childhood in that narrowing conception of Christianity, and
that outward form of religiousness, against which, more than
anything, he bore witness as a Reformer.

God was pictured to him as a Being unapproachably sublime, and of
awful holiness; Christ, the Saviour, Mediator, and Advocate, whose
revelation can only bring judgment to those who reject salvation, as
the threatening Judge, against whose wrath, as against that of God,
man sought for intercession and mediation from the Virgin and the
other saints. This latter worship, towards the close of the middle
ages, had increased in importance and extent. Peculiar honour was
paid to particular saints, in particular places, and for the
furtherance of particular interests. The warlike St. George was the
special saint of the town and county of Mansfeld: his effigy still
surmounts the entrance to the old school-house. Among the miners the
worship of St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin, soon became popular
towards the end of the century, and the mining town of Annaberg,
built in 1496, was named after her. Luther records how the 'great
stir' was first made about her, when he was a boy of fifteen, and
how he was then anxious to place himself under her protection. There
is no lack of religious writings of that time, which, with the view
of preserving the Catholic faith, warn men earnestly against the
danger of overvaluing the saints, and of placing their hopes more in
them than in God; but we see from those very warnings how necessary
they were, and later history shows us how little fruit they bore. As
for Luther, certain beautiful features in the lives and legends of
the saints exercised over him a power of attraction which he never
afterwards renounced; and of the Virgin he always spoke with tender
reverence, only regretting that men wished to make an idol of her.
But of his early religious belief, he says that Christ appeared to
him as seated on a rainbow, like a stern Judge; from Christ men
turned to the saints, to be their patrons, and called on the Virgin
to bare her breasts to her Son, and dispose him thereby to mercy. An
example of what deceptions were sometimes practised in such worship
came to the notice of the Elector John Frederick, the friend of
Luther, and probably originated in a convent at Eisenach. It was a
figure, carved in wood, of the Virgin with the infant Saviour in her
arms, which was furnished with a secret contrivance by means of
which the Child, when the people prayed to him, first turned away to
His mother, and only when they had invoked her as intercessor, bowed
towards them with His little arms outstretched.

On the other hand, the sinner who was troubled with cares about his
soul and thoughts of Divine judgment, found himself directed to the
performance of particular acts of penance and pious exercises, as
the means to appease a righteous God. He received judgment and
commands through the Church at the confessional. The Reformers
themselves, and Luther especially, fully recognised the value of
being able to pour out the inner temptations of the heart to some
Christian father-confessor, or even to some other brother in the
faith, and to obtain from his lips that comfort of forgiveness which
God, in His love and mercy, bestows freely on the faithful. But
nothing of this kind, they said, was to be found in the
confessional. The conscience was tormented with the enumeration of
single sins, and burdened with all sorts of penitential formalities;
and it was just with a view that everyone should be drawn to this
discipline of the Church, should use it regularly, and should seek
for no other way to make his peace with God, that the educational
activity of the Church, both with young and old, was especially
directed.

Luther, in after life, as we have already remarked, always
recognised and found comfort in the fact that, even under such
conditions as the above, enough of the simple message of salvation
in the Bible could penetrate the heart, and awaken a faith which, in
spite of all artificial restraints and perplexing dogmas, should
throw itself, with inward longing and childlike trust, into the arms
of God's mercy, and so enjoy true forgiveness. He received, as we
shall see, some salutary directions for so doing from later friends
of his, who belonged to the Romish Church, nor was that character of
ecclesiastical religiousness, so to speak, stamped everywhere, or to
the same degree, on Christian life in Germany during his youth.
Nevertheless, his whole inner being, from boyhood, was dominated by
its influence; he, at all events, had never been taught to
appreciate the Gospel as a child. Looking back in later years on his
monastic days, and the whole of his previous life, he declared that
he never could feel assured that his baptism in Christ was
sufficient for his salvation, and that he was sorely troubled with
doubt whether any piety of his own would be able to secure for him
God's mercy. Thoughts of this kind he said induced him to become a
monk.

Men have never been wanting, either before or since the time of
Luther's youth, to denounce the abuses and corruptions of the
Church, and particularly of the clergy. Language of this sort had
long found its way to the popular ear, and had proceeded also from
the people themselves. Complaints were made of the tyranny of the
Papal hierarchy, and of their encroachments on social and civil
life, as well as of the worldliness and gross immorality of the
priests and monks. The Papacy had reached its lowest depth of moral
degradation under Pope Alexander VI. We hear nothing, however, of
the impressions produced on Luther, in this respect, in the
circumstances of his early life. The news of such scandals as were
then enacted at Rome, shamelessly and in open day, very likely took
a long while to reach Luther and those about him. With regard to the
carnal offences of the clergy, against which, to the honour of
Germany be it said, the German conscience especially revolted, he
made afterwards the noteworthy remark, that although during his
boyhood the priests allowed themselves mistresses, they never
incurred the suspicion of anything like unbridled sensuality or
adulterous conduct. Examples of such kind date only from a later
period.

The loyalty with which Mansfeld, his home, adhered to the ancient
Church, is shown by several foundations of that time, all of which
have reference to altars and the celebration of mass. The overseer
of the mines, Reinicke, the friend of Luther's family, is among the
founders: he left provision for keeping up services in honour of the
Virgin and St. George.

A peculiarly reverential demeanour, in regard to religion and the
Church, is observable in Luther's father, and one which was common
no doubt among his honest, simple, pious fellow townsfolk. His
conduct was consistently God-fearing. In his house it was afterwards
told how he would often pray at the bedside of his little Martin,--how,
as the friend of godliness and learning, he had enjoyed the friendship
of priests and school-teachers. Words of pious reflection from his
lips remained stamped on Luther's memory from his boyhood. Thus
Luther tells us, in a sermon preached towards the close of his life,
how he had often heard his dear father say, that, as his own parents
had told him, the earth contains many more who require to be fed
than there are sheaves, even if collected from all the fields in the
world; and yet how wondrously does God know how to preserve mankind!
In common with his fellow-townsmen, he followed the precepts and
commands of his Church. When, in the year in which he sent his son to
Magdeburg, two new altars in the church at Mansfeld were consecrated
to a number of saints, and sixty days' indulgence was granted to
anyone who heard mass at them, Hans Luther, with Reinicke and other
fellow-magistrates, was among the first to make use of the invitation.
The enemies of the Reformer, while fain to trace his origin to a
heretic Bohemian, had not a shadow of a reason for suspecting his real
father of any leanings to heresy. Nor do we hear a word in later years
from the Reformer, after his father had separated with him from the
Catholic Church, to show a trace of any hostile or critical remark
against that Church, remembered from the lips of his father during
childhood. Quietly but firmly the latter asserted his own judgment,
and framed his will accordingly. He was firm, in particular, in the
consciousness of his paternal rights and duties, even against the
pretensions of the clergy. Thus, as his son Martin tells us, when he
lay once on the point of death, and the priest admonished him to
leave something to the clergy, he replied in the simplicity of his
heart, 'I have many children: I will leave it them, for they want it
more.' We shall see how unyieldingly, when his son entered a convent,
he insisted, as against all the value and usefulness of monasticism,
on the paramount obligation of God's command, that children should
obey their parents. Luther also tells us how his father once praised
in high terms the will left by a Count of Mansfeld, who without
leaving any property to the Church, was content to depart from this
world trusting solely to the bitter sufferings and death of Christ,
and commending his soul to Him. Luther himself, when a young student,
would have considered, as he tells us, a bequest to churches or
convents a proper will to make. His father afterwards accepted his
son's doctrine of salvation without hesitation, and with the full
conviction that it was right. But remarks of his such as we have
quoted, were consistent with a perfectly blameless demeanour in
regard to the forms of conduct and belief as prescribed by the Church,
with an avoidance of criticism and argument on ecclesiastical matters,
which he knew were not his vocation, and above all with a complete
abstention from such talk in the presence of his children. As to what
concerns further the positive religious influence which he exercised
over his children, any such impressions as he might have given by what
he said of the Count of Mansfeld, were fully counterbalanced by the
severity and firmness of his paternal discipline.

Concurrent with the doctrine of salvation through the intercession
of the saints and the Church, and one's own good works, which Luther
had been taught from his youth, were the dark popular ideas of the
power of the devil--ideas, which, though not actually invented, were
at least patronised by the Church, and which not only threaten the
souls of men, but cast a baneful spell over all their natural life.
Luther, as is well known, has frequently expressed his own opinions
about the devil, in connection with the enchantments supposed to be
practised by the Evil One on mankind, and, more especially, on the
subject of witchcraft. Of one thing he was certain, that in God's
hand we are safe from the Evil One, and can triumph over him. But
even he believed the devil's work was manifested in sudden accidents
and striking phenomena of Nature, in storms, conflagrations, and the
like. As to the tales of sorcery and magic, which were told and
believed in by the people, some he declared to be incredible, others
he ascribed to the hallucinations effected by the devil. But that
witches had power to do one bodily harm, that they plagued children
in particular, and that their spells could affect the soul, he never
seriously doubted.

From his earliest childhood, and especially at home, ideas of that
kind had been instilled into Luther, and accordingly they ministered
strong food to his imagination. They had just then spread to a
remarkable extent among the Germans, and had developed in remarkable
ways. They had affected the administration of ecclesiastical and
civil law, they had given rise to the Inquisition and the most
barbarous cruelties in the punishment of those who were pretended to
be in league with the devil, and they had gradually multiplied their
baneful effects. The year after Luther's birth, appeared the
remarkable Papal bull which sanctioned the trial of witches. When a
boy, Luther heard a great deal about witches, though later in life
he thought there was no longer so much talk about them, and he would
not scruple to tell stories of how they harmed men and cattle, and
brought down storms and hail. Nay, of his own mother he believed
that she had suffered much from the witcheries of a female
neighbour, who, as he said, 'plagued her children till they nearly
screamed themselves to death.' Delusions such as these are certainly
dark shadows in the picture of Luther's youth, and are important
towards understanding his inner life as a man.