McGiffert's Martin Luther, pp.1-10

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Martin Luther: the man and his work

By Arthur Cushman McGiffert

CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

GREAT men need not that we praise them; the need is ours that we know them. They are our common heritage. Whether we be of their faith or of another, whether our fathers fought with them or with their enemies, whether we stand where they stood or have traveled far on ways they dreamed not of, we are the richer that they lived.

This shall be a plain and literal tale. If its hero will but speak for himself and we may enter into some degree of intimacy and gain some measure of acquaintance with him as he was, this writing will not be vain.

He was very human, this hero of ours, fiery-tempered, passionate, imperious, lovable withal, warmhearted, and generous to a fault. Full of contradictions, he had the frankness and carelessness of genius, and what he was he showed, and what he thought he said, without concealment or diplomacy. Like a Cromwell or a Napoleon in his masterful will, he was like our own Lincoln in his human sympathies, his simplicity of character, his transparent honesty. Like him he wastoo in his quickness of perception, his quaint humor, and his homeliness of speech.

He came, as so many of the world's great men come, of peasant stock. "I am a peasant's son; my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather were genuine peasants," he was accustomed to say, not without a touch of pride, and in spite of his opinion that "there is as little sense in boasting of one's ancestry as in the devil's priding himself on his angelic lineage." He was of the common people and was glad of it. It was ore of the secrets of his power. "Rich folks' children," he once remarked, "seldom turn out well. They are complacent, arrogant, and conceited, and think they need to learn nothing because they have enough to live on, anyway. On the contrary, poor men's sons must labor to lift themselves out of the dust and must endure greatly. And because they have nothing to boast about or pride themselves upon, they trust God, control themselves, and keep still. The poor fear God, therefore He gives them good heads that they may study, become educated and intelligent, and be able to assist princes, kings, and emperors with their wisdom."

Luther's family was not of the lowest class. For generations his ancestors had owned their house and farm in the village of Mohra on the western side of the Thuringian hills. There are still Luthers in the same tiny hamlet, changed perhaps as little as the place itself. Common custom, admirably careful of those most needing care, made the youngest child heir of the ancestral home, and Hans Luther, an older son, after marrying Margarethe Ziegler, a maiden of good family from the neighboring town of Eisenach, went out to seek his fortune in the larger world. Sign of character that, and promise of more heroic venture in his first-born, does not need the wilds of a new

Copied from the original portrait by E. A. Schmidt

MARTIN LUTHER'S MOTHER

From the painting by Lucas Cranach in the Wartburg, Eisenach

experiences with a smile. It was a favorite saying of hers, which Martin loved to repeat, "If the world smiles not on you and me the fault is ours." She was imaginative and sensitive, the prey of all sorts of conflicting emotions, and she lived in devout and fearsome bondage to much that her husband must have laughed at. Mansfeld, with its somber woods and cavernous hills, was a congenial haunt of gnomes and fairies. Of the blacker sort they were apt to be. "In the mines," as Luther once said, "the devil teases and deceives people, makes a racket, and calls up specters before their eyes until they think they see a great heap of ore and pure silver where there is none at all. For if he can bewitch and fool men even above ground, by clear day, in the light of the sun, so that things look other than they are, he can do it still better in the mines." Margarethe felt the spell of the evil spirits, and their terror long lingered with the boy Martin. On one occasion she thought herself and her children bewitched by an unfriendly neighbor, and there was much ado to escape the curse.

Her oldest born was his mother's boy. When he reached maturity he looked remarkably like her in face and figure; and like her he was in temperament and disposition, with the stability and strength of his father's homely sense and obstinate will. In later years his mother used to say with pride that he was a dependable boy, the monitor of his brothers and sisters, to whom they all looked up, the inseparable companion and peculiar champion of his next younger brother, James.

Martin was not a pampered child. Hans and Margarethe took their parental responsibilities seriously and interpreted them rigorously. Both at home and in school discipline was harsh and sympathy scant for

It is difficult to associate such consequences with the great reformer, whose courage was his most conspicuous trait, but he spoke out of his own experience, and knew whereof he spoke. Though he recognized that his parents loved him and meant well by him, their severity made so painful an impression on him that in later life he held them responsible for his unhappy resolution to become a monk, and in his treatment of his own children he tried to make up to them for the sympathy he had lacked and the harshness he had suffered. And yet he is not the only boy by any means in that day, or this, who has been angered by a beating, and has found it hard to be reconciled again to his father. And if fifteen whippings in a single morning at school are rather more than most are called upon to endure, in Martin's case there may well have been exceptional provocation. A merry, high-spirited boy he doubtless was, mischievous, perhaps, and fond of practical jokes, as in later years. Stupid and vicious he certainly was not, and kindlier handling, as he often said, would equally have met the need. Without doubt he was treated as well as other boys of his class. That he was to become a great man nobody then realized, and yet it is only because he was a great man that we know anything about his boyhood trials and grievances, and, as he himself appreciated, there are worse things, after all, than rough treatment.

The public school, where he started so young that he often had to be carried to and fro by an older companion, was poor enough. In such a town it is apt to be. The methods were crude and the instructors inefficient, and, as was too often the case, they tried to make up for their own shortcomings by domineering treatment of the pupils under their care. The schools in his boyhood were "hell and purgatory," Luther once said. But the grown man who later condemned both school and teachers unsparingly judged them from the vantage-ground of a larger world and an improved system; for in education, as in many other things, a new world was in the making while he lived. Whereas in his youth, he once declared, it took almost a lifetime to acquire enough Latin to say mass, now children studied it with pleasure and mastered the language easily and rapidly. "Is it not known to everybody," he wrote, with his customary vehemence, "that boys are now so well prepared that in their fifteenth or eighteenth year they have more knowledge than they could formerly get in all the high schools and cloisters put together? What did they learn in those days except to be donkeys, logs, and blocks? They studied twenty and even forty years, and then knew neither Latin nor German."

That Martin was sent away to school to the city of Magdeburg at thirteen, instead of being kept at home to aid in the support of the family, speaks volumes both for the boy and for his parents. It is true he once confessed that he was not a success at mining. Not altogether to his regret, Satan had begrudged him the gift of discovering the hidden metal. Evidently he had been obliged to try his hand at it while still a young lad. His want of skill may have had something to do with the decision to give him a schooling, but his mental gifts were the determining factor. Great things were expected of him, and his father at least looked forward to the time when he should hold the honorable and lucrative position of legal adviser to the counts of Mansfeld. His own advance in life gave him a natural desire to see his eldest son rise still higher in the social scale. Hans was no common miner, and Martin was no common boy. The son's promise and the father's hopes went hand in hand.