Life of Luther | Page 7

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