The life of Martin Luther gathered from his own writings
by Jules Michelet
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Excerpt:
CHAPTER I.
A.d. 1483—1517.
Birth, Education of Luther.—His Ordination, Temptations, and Journey to Rome.
"In the many conversations I have had with Melancthon, I have told him my whole life from beginning to end. I am a peasant's son, and my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all common peasants. My father went to Mansfeld, and got employment in the mines there; and there I was born. That I should ever take my bachelor of arts and doctor's degree, &c., seemed not to be in the stars. How I must have surprised folks by turning monk; and then, again, by changing the brown cap for another! By so doing I occasioned real grief and trouble to my father. Afterwards I went to loggers with the pope, married a runaway nun, and had a family. Who foresaw this in the stars 1 Who could have told my career beforehand V
John Luther, the father of the celebrated Martin Luther, was of Moera or Moerke, a small village of Saxony, near Eisenach. His mother was the daughter of a lawyer of the last named town; or, according to a tradition, which strikes me as the preferable one of the two, of Neustadt in Franconia. A modern writer states, but without giving any authority for the anecdote, that John Luther, having had the misfortune to
V
kill a peasant who was herding his cattle in a meadow, was forced to fly to Eisleben, and afterwards to the valley of Mansfeld. His wife, who was in the family-way, accompanied him; and, on reaching Eisleben, she was brought to bed of Martin Luther. The father, a poor miner, had great difficulty in supporting his family, and, as will presently be seen, his children were sometimes obliged to have recourse to charity. Yet, instead of making them help him with their labor, he chose that they should go to school. John Luther seems to have been a simple and single-hearted man, and a sincere believer. When his pastor was administering consolation to him on his death-bed : " He must be a cold-blooded man," was his remark, "who does not believe what you are telling me." His wife did not survive him a year (a.d. 1531). They were at this time in the enjoyment of a small property, for which they were no doubt indebted to their son. John Luther left at his death, a house, two iron furnaces, and about a thousand thalers in ready money. The arms of Luther's father, for peasants assumed arms in imitation of the armorial bearings of the nobles, were a hammer, no more. Luther was not ashamed of his parents. He has consecrated their names by inserting them in the formulary of his marriage service: "Wilt thou, Hans (John), take Grethe (Margaret) to thy wedded wife," &c.
"It is my pious duty," he says in a letter to Melancthon, informing him of his father's death, "to mourn him of whom it was the will of the Father of Mercy that I should be born, him by whose labor and sweat God has supported and made me what I am, worm though I be. Assuredly I rejoice that he lived unto this day, to see the light of truth. Blessed be the counsels and the decrees of God for ever! Amen!"
Martin Luther, or Luder, or Lother (for so he sometimes signs himself), was born at Eisleben, on the 10th of November, 1483, at eleven in the evening. Sent at an early age to school at Eisenach (a.d. 1489), he sang in the streets for a livelihood, as was a common practice at that time with poor German students. We are made acquainted with this circumstance by himself:—" Let no one speak contemptuously before me of the poor ' companions,' who go about singing and crying at every door, Panem propter Deum! (bread for God's sake !) You know that the Psalm says—' Princes and kings have sung.' I, myself, have been a poor mendicant, and have received bread at the doors of houses, particularly in Eisencity!" He at length met with a more ceris well as an asylum, in the house of dame i or widow of John Schweickard, who took p the poor wandering child; and he was enabled by this i table woman to study four years at Eisenach. In 1501, he entered the university of Erfurth, where he was supported by his father. In one of his works, Luther mentions his benefactress in terms of tenderest emotion, and for her sake valued the sex all his life. After essaying theology, he was persuaded by his friends to devote himself to the study of the law, which, in that day, was the path to all lucrative offices in both church and state; but he never seemed to have been attached to it. He preferred general literature, and especially music, which was his passion, and which he cultivated all his life, and taught his children. He does not hesitate to own his opinion that, next to theology, music is the first of the arts :— "Music is the art of the prophets; the only one which, like theology, can calm the troubles of the soul, and put the devil to flight." He touched the lute, played on the flute. Perhaps he would have succeeded in other arts. He was the friend of the great painter, Lucas Cranach. He was, it seems, skilful with his hands, and acquired the art of turning. His predilection for music and literature, and the constant reading of the poets, with which he diversified his study of logic and of law, were far from foreshadowing the serious part which he was destined to play in the history of religion; and it is presumable, from various traditional anecdotes, that notwithstanding his application to his studies, he led the life of the German students of the day, and participated in their noisy habits, their gaiety in the midst of indigence, their union of a warlike exterior with sweetness of soul and a peaceful spirit, and of all the parade of a disorderly life with purity of morals. Certainly, if any one had met Martin Luther, travelling on foot from Erfurth to Mansfeld, in the third week of Lent, in the year 1503, with his sword and hunting-knife at his side, and constantly hurting himself with these weapons of his, he would never have thought that the awkward student would in a short time overthrow the dominion of the catholic church throughout half of Europe.
