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days for the civil power had been exercised, and that for the good of the people, in the lands of Brandenburg and of Saxony before the close of the fifteenth century. We have therefore this new thing, that the laity in power had begun to set quietly aside the immunities and privileges of the Church, to this extent at least, that the civil authorities compelled the local ecclesiastical institutions within their dominions to live under the rule of reform laid down by an ecumenical council, and that they did this despite the remonstrances of the superior ecclesiastical authorities.

The same assertion of the rights of laymen to do Christian work in their own way appears when the records of the boroughs are examined. The whole charitable system of the Middle Ages had been administered by the Church; all bequests for the relief of the poor had been placed in the hands of the clergy; and all donations for the relief of the poor were given to clerical managers. The burghers saw the charitable bequests of their forefathers grossly perverted from their original purposes, and it began to dawn upon them that, although the law of charity was part of the law of Christ, it did not necessarily follow that all charities must be under ecclesiastical administration. Hence cases appear, and that more frequently as the years pass, where burghers leave their charitable bequests to be managed by the town council or other secular authority; and this particular portion of Christian work ceased to be the exclusive possession of the clergy.

Another feature of the times was the growth of an immense number of novel religious associations or confraternities. They were not, like the praying circles of the Mystics or of the Gottesfreunde, strictly nonclerical or anti-clerical; they had no objection to the protection of the Church, but they had a distinctively lay character. Some of them were associations of artisans; and these were commonly called Kalands, because it was one of their rules to meet once a month for divine service, usually in a chapel belonging to one of the mendicant Orders. Others bore curious names, such as St Ursula's Schifflein, and enforced a rule that all the members must pray a certain number of times a week. Pious people frequently belonged to a number of these associations. The members united for religious purposes, generally under the auspices of the Church; but they were confraternities of laymen and women who had marked out for themselves their own course of religious duties quite independently of the Church and of its traditional ideals. Perhaps no greater contribution could be made to our knowledge of the quiet religious life at the close of the fifteenth century than to gather together in a monograph what can be known about these religious confraternities. Such was the religious atmosphere into which Luther was born and which he breathed from his earliest days. His mother taught him the simple evangelical hymns which had fed her own spiritual growth; his father had that sturdy common-sense piety which belonged to so

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many of the better disposed nobles, burghers, and artisans of the time; while the fear of Jesus the Judge, who was coming to judge and punish the wicked, branded itself on his child's soul when he gazed up at the vengeful picture of our Lord. He was taught at home the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, words of Jesus from the Gospels, the Creed, such simple hymns as Christ ist erstanden, Ein kindelein so löbelich, and Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist-all that went to make what he long afterwards called "the faith of the children." His father's strong dislike to monks and friars; the Hussite propaganda, which, in spite of all attempts at repression, had penetrated the Harz and Thuringia; the Mansfeld police regulations, with other evidence from the local chronicles, show how much the lay religion had made its way among the people. The popular revival displayed itself in the great processions and pilgrimages made to holy places in his neighbourhood-to Kyffhäuser, where there was a miraculous wooden cross, to the Bruno Chapel of Quernfurt, to the old chapel at Welfesholz, and to the cloister church at Wimmelberg.

Martin Luther was born on November 10, 1483, at Eisleben, and spent his childhood in Mansfeld. His father, Hans, was a miner in the Mansfeld district, where the policy of the counts of Mansfeld, to build and let out on hire small smelting furnaces, enabled thrifty and skilled workmen to rise in the world.

The boy grew up amidst the toilsome, grimy, often coarse surroundings of the German peasant life — protected from much that was evil by the wise severity of his parents, but sharing in its hardness, its superstitions, and its simple political and ecclesiastical ideas; as that the Emperor was God's ruler on the earth who would protect poor people from the Turk; that the Church was the "Pope's house," in which the Bishop of Rome was the house-father; and that obedience and reverence were due to the lords of the soil. He went to the village school in Mansfeld and endured the cruelties of a merciless pedagogue; he was sent later to a school at Magdeburg, and then to St George's High School at Eisenach. In these boyish days he was a "poor student," i.e. one who got his education and lodging free, was obliged to sing in the church choir, and was permitted to sing in the streets, begging for bread. His later writings abound in references to these early school-days and to his own quiet thoughts; and they make it plain that the religion of fear was laying hold on him and driving out the earlier simple family faith. Two pictures branded themselves on his childish mind at Magdeburg. He saw a young Prince of Anhalt, who had forsaken rank and inheritance and, to save his soul, had become a barefooted friar, carrying the huge begging-sack, and worn to skin and bone by his scourgings and fastings and prayers. The other was an altar-piece in a church, the picture of a ship in which was no layman, not even a King or a Prince; in it were the Pope with his Cardinals and Bishops, and the Holy Ghost

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[1483-1501 hovered over them directing their course, while priests and monks managed the oars and the sails, and thus they went sailing heavenwards. The laymen were swimming in the water beside the ship; some were drowning, others were holding on by ropes which the monks and priests cast out to them to aid them. No layman was in the ship and no ecclesiastic was in the water. The picture haunted him for years. At Eisenach he had some glimpses of the old simple family life, this time accompanied by a new refinement, in the house of the lady whom most biographers identify with Frau Cotta. But the religious atmosphere of the town which the boy inhaled and enjoyed was new. The town was under the spell of St Elizabeth, the pious Landgravine who had given up family life, children, and all earthly comforts, to earn a medieval saintship. Her good deeds were blazoned on the windows of the church in which Luther sang as choir-boy, and he had long conversations with some of the monks who belonged to her foundations. The novel surroundings tended to lead him far from the homely piety of his parents and from the more cultured family religion of his new friends, and he confesses that it was with incredulous surprise that he heard Frau Cotta say that there was nothing on earth more lovely than the love of husband and wife when it is in the fear of the Lord. He had surrendered himself to that revival of crude medieval religion which was based on fear, and which found an outlet in fastings, scourgings, pilgrimages, saint-worship, and in general in the thought that salvation demanded the abandonment of family, friends, and the activities and enjoyments of life in the world.

After three happy years at Eisenach Luther was sent to Erfurt and entered his name on the matriculation roll in letters which can still be read, Martinus Ludher ex Mansfeldt. Hans Luther had been prospering; he was able to pay for his son's college expenses; Luther was no longer a "poor student," but was able to give undivided attention to his studies. The father meant the son to become a trained lawyer; and the lad of seventeen seems to have accepted without question the career marked out for him.

The University of Erfurt was in Luther's days the most famous in Germany. It had been founded in 1392 by the burghers, and academic and burgher life mingled there as nowhere else. The graduation days were town holidays, and the graduation ceremonies always included a procession of the University authorities, the gilds and the town. officials, with all the attendant medieval pomp, and concluded with a torchlight march at night. But if the University was strictly allied to the town it was as strongly united to the Church. It had been enriched with numerous papal privileges; its chancellor was the Archbishop of Mainz; many of its theological professors held ecclesiastical prebends, and others were monks of different Orders and notably of the Augustinian Eremites. The whole teaching staff went solemnly to hear

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mass at the beginning of every term; each faculty was under the protection of a patron Saint-St George presiding over the faculty of Philosophy; the professors had to swear to teach nothing opposed to the doctrine of the Roman Church; and care was taken to prevent the beginnings and spread of heretical opinions.

The University teaching was medieval in all essentials, but represented the new, as Cologne championed the old, scholasticism. Gabriel Biel, the disciple of William of Occam, had been one of the teachers. Humanism of the German type, which was very different from the Italian, had found an entrance as early as 1460 in the persons of Peter Luder and Jacob Publicius, and in the following years there was a good deal of intercourse between Erfurt scholars and Italian humanists. Maternus Pistoris was lecturing on the Latin classics in 1494 and had for his colleague Nicholas Marschalk, who was the first to establish a printing-press in Germany for Greek books. They had speedily gathered round them a band of enthusiastic scholars, Johannes Jäger of Drontheim (Crotus Rubeanus), Henry and Peter Eberach, George Burkhardt of Spelt (Spalatinus), John Lange, and others known afterwards in the earlier stages of the Reformation movement. Conrad Mutti (Mutianus Rufus), who had studied in Italy, was one of the leaders; Eoban of Hesse (Helius Eobanus Hessus), perhaps the most gifted of them all, joined the circle in 1494. These humanists did not attack openly the older course of study at Erfurt. They wrote complimentary Latin poems in praise of their older colleagues; they formed a select circle. who were called the "Poets"; they affected to correspond with each other after the manner of the ancients. In private, Mutianus and Crotus seem to have delighted to reveal their eclectic theosophy to a band of half-terrified, half-admiring youths; to say that there was but one God, who had the various names of Jupiter, Mars, Hercules, Jesus, and one Goddess, who was called Juno, Diana, or Mary as the worshippers chose; but these things were not supposed to be for the public ear.

The University of Erfurt in the beginning of the sixteenth century was the recognised meeting-place of the two opposing tendencies of scholasticism and humanism; and it was also, perhaps in a higher degree than any other university, a place where the student was exposed to many other diverse influences. The system of biblical exegesis first stimulated by Nicholas de Lyra, which cannot be classed under scholasticism or humanism, had found a succession of able teachers in Erfurt. The strong anti-clerical teaching of Jacob of Juterbogk and of John Wessel, who had taught in Erfurt for fifteen years, had left its mark on the University and was not forgotten. Low mutterings of the Hussite propaganda itself, Luther tells us, could be heard from time to time, urging a strange Christian socialism which was at the same time thoroughly anti-clerical. Then over against all this opportunities were occasionally given, at the visits of papal Legates, for seeing the

Wrong! it's

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[1501-5 magnificence and might of the Roman Church and of the Pope its head. In 1502 and again in 1504, during Luther's student days, Cardinal Raimund, sent to proclaim in Germany new and unheard-of Indulgences, visited the university town. The civic dignitaries, the Rector Magnificus with the whole University, all the clergy, the monks and the school children, accompanied by crowds of the townsfolk, went out in procession to meet him and escort him with due ceremony into the city. Add to this the gross dissipation existing among many of the student sets, and the whisperings of foul living on the part of many of the higher clergy in the town, and some idea can be formed of the sea of trouble, doubt, questioning, and anxiety into which a bright, sensitive, imaginative, and piously disposed lad of seventeen was thrown when he had begun his student life in Erfurt.

When we piece together references in correspondence to Luther's student life, recollections of his fellow-students, and scattered sayings of his own in after-life, we get upon the whole the idea of a very levelheaded youth, with a strong sense of the practical side of his studies, thoroughly respected by his professors, refusing to be carried away into any excess of humanist enthusiasm on the one hand or of physical dissipation on the other; intent only to profit by the educational advantages within his reach and to justify the sacrifices which his father was making on his behalf. He had been sent to Erfurt to become a jurist, and the faculty of Philosophy afforded the preparation. for the faculty of Law as well as of Theology. Luther accordingly began the course of study prescribed in the faculty of Philosophy Logic, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, followed by Physics and Astronomy, the teaching in all cases consisting of abstract classification and distinctions without any real study of life or of fact. The teacher he most esteemed was John Trutvetter, the famed "Erfurt Doctor" whose fame and genius, as all good Germans thought, had made Erfurt as well known as Paris. Scholasticism, he said, left him little time for poetry and classical studies. He does not seem to have attended any of the humanist lectures. But he read privately a large number of the Latin classical authors. Virgil, whose pages he opened with some dread, for was he not in medieval popular legend a combination of wizard and prophet of Christ? became his favourite author. His peasant upbringing made him take great delight in the Bucolics and Georgics-books, he said, that only a herd and a countryman can rightly understand. Cicero charmed him; he delighted in his public labours for his country and in his versatility, and believed him to be a much better philosopher than Aristotle. He read Livy, Terence, and Plautus. He prized the pathetic portions of Horace but esteemed him inferior to Prudentius. He seems also to have read from a volume of selections portions of Propertius, Persius, Lucretius, Tibullus, Silvius Italicus, Statius, and Claudian. We hear of him studying Greek privately with John Lange. But he was never a member