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 the birth of the Holy Child at Bethlehem. Once, as they were singing before the door of a solitary farmhouse, the farmer came out and called to them roughly, 'Where are you, young rascals?' He had two large sausages in his hand for them, but they ran away terrified, till he shouted after them to come back and fetch the sausages. So intimidated, says Luther, had he become by the terrors of school discipline. His object, however, in relating this incident was to show his hearers how the heart of man too often construes manifestations of God's goodness and mercy into messages of fear, and how men should pray to God perseveringly, and without timidity or shamefacedness. In those days it was not rare to find even scholars of the better classes, such as the son of a magistrate at Mansfeld, and those who, for the sake of a better education, were sent to distant schools, seeking to add to their means in the manner we have mentioned.
After this, his father sent him to Eisenach, bearing in mind the numerous relatives who lived in the town and surrounding country, and who might be of service to him. But of these no mention has reached us, except of one, named Konrad, who was sacristan in the church of St. Nicholas. The others, no doubt, were not in a position to give him any material assistance.
About this time his singing brought him under the notice of one Frau Cotta, who with genuine affection took up the promising boy, and whose memory, in connection with the great Reformer, still lives in the hearts of the German people. Her husband, Konrad or Kunz, was one of the most influential citizens of the town, and sprang from a noble Italian family who had acquired wealth by commerce. Ursula Cotta, as her name was, belonged to the Eisenach family of Schalbe. She died in 1511. Mathesius tells us how the boy won her heart by his singing and his earnestness in prayer, and she welcomed him to her own table. Luther met with similar acts of kindness from a brother or other relative of hers, and also from an institution belonging to Franciscan friars at Eisenach, which was indebted to the Schalbe family for several rich endowments, and was named, in consequence, the Schalbe College. At Frau Cotta's, Luther was first introduced to the life in a patrician's house, and learned to move in that society.
At Eisenach he remained at school for four years. Many years afterwards we find him on terms of friendly and grateful intercourse with one Father Wiegand, who had been his schoolmaster there. Ratzeberger, speaking of the then schoolmaster at Eisenach, mentions a 'distinguished poet and man of learning, John Trebonius,' who, as he tells us, every morning, on entering the schoolroom, would take off his biretta, because God might have chosen many a one of the lads present to be a future mayor, or chancellor, or learned doctor; a thought which, as he adds, was amply realised afterwards in the person of Doctor Luther. The relations of these two at the school, which contained several classes, must be a matter of conjecture. But the system of teaching pursued there was praised afterwards by Luther himself to Melancthon. The former acquired there that thorough knowledge of Latin which was then the chief preparation for University study. He learned to write it, not only in prose, but also in verse, which leads us to suppose that the school at Eisenach took a part in the Humanistic movement already mentioned. Happily, his active mind and quick understanding had already begun to develop; not only did he make up for lost ground, but 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.