Life of Luther | Page 7

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