Life of Luther | Page 9

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