Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/140

110 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