In the early periods of the mediæval Church her missionaries came to
these fiery warriors of the North and followed the conquests of
Charlemagne, to teach them that they had souls, that there is a living
and all-knowing God at whose judgment-bar all must one day stand to
give account, and that it would then be well with the believing,
brave, honest, true, and good, and ill with cowards, profligates, and
liars. It was a simple creed, but it took fast hold on the Germanic
heart, to show itself in sturdy power in the long after years.
This creed, in unabated force, descended to Luther's parents, and
lived and wrought in them as a controlling principle. They were also
strict to render it the same in their children.
_Hans Luther_ was a hard and stern disciplinarian, unsparing in the
enforcement of every virtue.
_Margaret Luther_[2] was noted among her neighbors as a model woman,
and was so earnest in her inculcations of right that she preferred to
see her son bleed beneath the rod rather than that he should do a
questionable thing even respecting so small a matter as a nut.
From his childhood Luther was thus trained and attempered to fear
God, reverence truth and honesty, and hate hypocrisy and lies.
Possibly his parents were severer with him than was necessary, but it
was well for him, as the prospective prophet of a new era, to learn
absolute obedience to those who were to him the representatives of
that divine authority which he was to teach the world supremely to
obey.
But no birth, or blood, or parental drilling, or any mere human
culture, could give the qualities necessary to a successful Reformer.
The Church had fallen into all manner of evils, because it had drifted
away from the apostolic doctrine as to how a man shall be just with
God; which is the all-conditioning question of all right religion.
There could then be no cure for those evils except by the bringing of
the Church back to that doctrine. But to do anything effectual toward
such a recovery it was pre-eminently required that the Reformer
himself should first be brought to an experimental knowledge of what
was to be witnessed and taught.
On two different theatres, therefore, the Reformation had to be
wrought out: first, in the Reformer's own soul, and then on the field
of the world outside of him.