Mathesius

his son, that God would bless him and make him useful. says that Luther's father, not only for his own gratification, but especially for the benefit of his son, frequently invited the clergymen and school-teachers of the place to his house. Thus were domestic influences brought in aid, in every suitable way, to form a taste for moral and intellectual culture.

Mansfeld was situated in a narrow valley along the brook Thalbach, skirted by hills on both sides. From that part of the town where Luther's father resided, it was some distance to the schoolhouse, which was situated on a hill. The house is still standing, and the first story of it remains unaltered. One writer says (on what authority we do not know), that Luther commenced going to school at the age of seven. Certainly he was so young that he was carried thither by older persons. When forty-four years old, two years before his death, he wrote on the blank leaf in the Bible of Nicholas Oemler, who had married one of his sisters, the twentyfourth verse of the 14th chapter of John, and under it: To my good old friend, Nicholas Oemler, who more than once did carry me in his arms to school and back again, when I was a small lad, neither of us then knowing that one brother-in-law was carrying another in his arms.' In this school, though its teachers were frequently guests at his father's house, he was brought under a much harsher discipline than he had been subject to at home. It was not without allusion to his own experience, that he afterwards speaks of a class of teachers, who hurt noble minds by their vehement storming, beating and pounding, wherein they treat children as a jailor doth convicts.' He somewhere says, that he was once flogged fifteen times in a single forenoon at school. Again, he says, 'I have seen, when I was a boy, divers teachers who found their pleasure in beating their pupils.' 'The schools were purgatories, and the teachers were tyrants and task-masters.'

The injurious manner in which such treatment acted upon his fears is illustrated by an anecdote related by Luther in his Commentary on Genesis. When I was a lad, I was wont to go out with my companions begging food for our sustentation while we were at the school. At Christmas, during divine service, we went around among the small villages, singing from house to house, in four parts, as we were wont, the hymn on the child Jesus born at Bethlehem. We came by chance before the hut of a peasant who lived apart at the end of the village; and when he heard us singing, he came out, and after the coarse and harsh manner of the peasants, said, 'Where are you, boys?' at the same time bringing us a few saus

ages in his hand. But we were so terrified at these words, that we all scampered off, though we knew no good reason why, save that from the daily threats and tyranny practiced by the teachers toward their pupils at that time, we had learned to be timid.' This incident, which has commonly been referred to the time when Luther was at Magdeburg. probably belongs to the period of his earlier childhood at Mansfeld. For it was when he was 'a small boy,' and was under severe teachers, which seems not to have been the case except at Mansfeld. The circumstance that Luther was then living at his father's house, will be no objection, if we consider the customs of the times and the poverty of the family at that early period. We are elsewhere informed that Luther was then accustomed to attend funeral processions as a singer, for which.he received a groschen (about three cents), each time.

The school at Mansfeld, at that time, was taught by one master, assisted by two members of the church choir, that is, two theological students, who, for a small stipend, attended on the daily services of the church. Here it becomes necessary to describe the character of the lower schools of Germany at the close of the fifteenth century. They were called 'trivial schools,' because originally the first three of the seven liberal arts, namely, grammar, rhetoric, and logic, were taught in them.

At this time, however, and particularly at Mansfeld, a little monkish Latin, the pieces of music commonly sung at church, and the elements of arithmetic, constituted the studies of the lower schools. These schools were all taught by a master, assisted by theological students and candidates for some of the lower clerical offices. But as nearly all the offices of state at that time were in the bands of the clergy, there was a general rush to the schools on the part of all who were seeking to rise above the common walks of life. The great mass of the youth were wholly destitute of education. All the others, except a few from the sons of the rich, went through a clerical or ecclesiastical course of instruction. No matter to what offices they were aspiring, they must study under the direction of the church and under the tuition of monks and priests, or candidates for the priestly office.

The arrangements of the schools were these: The teachers, and the pupils who were from abroad, occupied large buildings with gloomy cells. A sombre monastic dress distinguished them both from other persons. A large portion of the forenoon of each day was devoted to the church. At high mass all must be present. The boys were educated to perform church ceremonies, while but

little attention was given to what is now commonly taught in schools. The assistant teacher, candidates for the clerical office, generally taught a few hours in the day, and performed, at the same time, some daily inferior church service, for both of which they received but a trifling reward.

Thus the schools were but a part and parcel of the church. The assistants were commonly taken from those strolling young men who infested the country, going from place to place either as advanced students, and changing their place at pleasure, or seeking some subordinate employment in the schools or in the church. When they failed to find employ, they resorted to begging, and even to theft, to provide for their subsistence. The older students would generally seek out each a young boy as his ward, and initiate him into the mysteries of this vagrant mode of life, receiving in turn his services in begging articles of food, and in performing other menial offices.

We have a living picture of the manners and habits which prevailed in these schools, in the autobiography of Thomas Platter,* a contemporary of Luther and a native of Switzerland.

At that time,' that is, in his tenth year, he says in his biography, 'came a cousin of mine, who had been at the schools [to become a priest] in Ulm and Munich in Bavaria. My friends spake to him of me, and he promised to take me with him to the schools in Germany: for I had learned of the village priest to sing a few of the church hymns. When Paul (for that was my cousin's name) was ready to go on his way, my uncle gave me a gulden [sixty-three cents], which I put into the hands of Paul. I must promise that I would do the begging, and give what I got to him, my bacchant (protector), for his disposal. We journeyed to Zurich, where Paul would wait till he should be joined by some companions. Then we determined to set out for Misnia [in the present kingdom of Saxony]. Meanwhile I went a-begging, and thus furnished the sustentation of Paul. After tarrying eight or nine weeks, we left Zurich and went on our way to Misnia, in a company of eight, whereof three of us were young schütze [wards]; the rest were large bacchantes, as they are called. Of all the wards I was the youngest. When I was so weary that I could hardly go, my cousin Paul would go behind me and scourge me on my bare legs, for I had no hose and only poor shoes. While on the way, I heard the bacchantes tell how that in Misnia and Silesia the scholars were wont to steal geese and ducks and other things for food, and that no other notice was taken thereof, if one could but only escape from the owners. Then said I to my companions, 'When shall we come to Misnia, where I may go out stealing geese? They replied, 'We are already there.' We went to Halle, in Saxony, and there we joined ourselves to the school of St. Ulrich. But as our bacchiantes entreated us roughly, some of us communed on the matter with my cousin Paul, and we agreed together that we would run away from them, and depart to Dresden. Here we found no good school, and the houses, moreover, were infested with vermin. Wherefore we went from that place to Breslau. We suffered much in the way from hunger, having on certain days nothing to eat but raw onions with salt. We slept oftentimes in the open air, because we could not get an entrance into the houses, but were driven off. and sometimes the dogs were set upon us. When we came to Breslau we found abundant stores, and food was so cheap that some of our company surfeited

Barnard's American Journal of Education, V., p. 79.

themselves and fell sick. We went at the first into the school at the dome [cathedral of the Holy Cross; but learning that there were some Switzer youth in the parish of St. Elizabeth, we removed thither. The city of Breslau hath seven parishes, with a school in each. No scholar is suffered to go around singing in another parish; and if any one taketli upon him to do so, he getteth a round beating. Sometimes, it is said, sundry thousands of scholars are found in Breslau, who get their living by begging. Some bacchantes abide in the schools twenty and even thirty years, having their sustentation from what their wards beg. I have oftentimes borne five or six loads home to the school the selfsame evening for my bacchantes; for being small, and a Switzer besides, I was kindly received by the people, In the winter, the small boys were wont to sleep on the floor of the school-house, the bacchantes in the mean season sleeping in the cells, whereof there are not a few hundreds at the school of St. Elizabeth. In the warm parts of the year, we were wont to lie on the ground in the churchyard; and when it rained, to run into the school-house, and if it stormed velemently to sing responses and other pieces the whole night long with the sub-chianter. Ofttimes after supper, in the summer evenings, did we go into the beer-houses to buy beer, and sometimes would drink so much that we could not find our way back. To be short, there was plenty of food, but not much studying here. At St. Elizabeth's, nine bachelors did teach every day, one hour each in the selfsame room. The Greek tongue was not studied at all. No printed books did the students have of their own. The preceptor alone had an imprinted Terence. What should be read was at the first dictated and copied, and then construed and explicated, so that the bacchantes bore away great heaps of manuscripts.'

It was from such strolling bacchantes, as are portrayed to the life by Platter, that the assistant teachers were taken, who assumed the name of locuti (located or settled), when they obtained a place. Their education consisted of a knowledge of the church service, of church music, of a little Latin, and of writing and arithmetic. Their character corresponded to that of the church at large in that rude and licentious age. They were, for the most part, mere adventurers and vagabonds, neither loving nor understanding the art of teaching any better than they did the nature of true religion, whose servants they professed to be. They remained but a short time in a place, never pretended to study the character and disposition of their pupils, taught mechanically, and ruled not by affection but by brute and brutal force. The greater part of what they taught was nearly useless. Study was a mere exercise of the memory.

The school at Mansfeld was no exception to the general character of the schools in the smaller towns at that time. We are not left to conjecture whether Luther was familiar with such scenes as have been alluded to. Speaking, at a later period of life, on the duty of maintaining good public schools, he says, somewhat indignantly: 'Such towns as will not have good teachers, now that they can be gotten, ought, as formerly, to have locati and bacchantes, stupid asses, who cost money enough, and yet teach their pupils nothing save to become asses like themselves.' 'Not a single branch of study,' says he, in another place, was at that time taught as it should be.' Referring to their brutality, he says, 'When they could

not vent their spleen against the higher teachers, they would pour it out upon the poor boys.'

In respect to the studies of Luther at Mansfeld, which continued up to his fourteenth year, Mathesius, his intimate friend, says he learned there his Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, Donatus, the Child's Grammar, Cisio Janus, and church music.' Donatus was to Latin grammar of the middle ages what Murray has been to English grammar. Cisio Janus are the first words of a church calendar in monkish Latin verse, made up of mutilated words, cisio, standing for circumcisio (circumcision). Next to monastic works, Terence and Plautus, the two Roman come dians, were most studied, as they furnished the readiest means of learning the colloquial Latin, so important to the clergy at that time.

Luther laments that he had not, in those schools which he attended in his boyhood, 'read the poets and historians, which no one taught him,' instead of which he learned with great labor what with equal labor he now had to unlearn.' 'Is it not plain,' he somewhere says, 'that one can now teach a boy in three years, by the time he is fifteen or eighteen years old, more than was aforetime learned in all the universities and cloisters? Twenty, yea forty years have men studied, and yet known neither Latin nor German, not to mention the scandalous lives which the youth there learned to lead.' It was pitiful enough for a boy to spend many years only to learn bad Latin sufficient for becoming a priest and for saying mass, and then be pronounced happy, and happy, too, the mother who bore him.' And he is still a poor ignorant creaturecan neither cluck nor lay eggs; and yet such are the teachers which we have every where had.'

Luther was educated under that peculiar type of religion which prevailed in Thuringia. Here it was that Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, in the eighth century, with other missionaries from the British Islands, carried on their most important operations for evangelizing Germany, founding there the Papal church, and thus corrupting Christianity at its very introduction. Here was the great cloister of Fulda, the chief seminary of sacred learning, and the centre of religious influence for the surrounding country. It was in Thuringia that St. Elizabeth, the Thuringian landgravine, whose memory lived in popular legends till Luther's times, and who was a favorite saint with him, was the embodiment of the religious spirit of the people, a spirit of deep sincerity united with childish simplicity and superstition. The Thuringians are proverbially an hon