Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/142

 magnificence and might of the Roman Church and of the Pope its head. In 1502 and again in 1504, during Luther's student days, Cardinal Raimund, sent to proclaim in Germany new and unheard-of Indulgences, visited the university town. The civic dignitaries, the Hector Magnificus with the whole University, all the clergy, the monks and the school children, accompanied by crowds of the townsfolk, went out in procession to meet him and escort him with due ceremony into the city. Add to this the gross dissipation existing among many of the student sets, and the whisperings of foul living on the part of many of the higher clergy in the town, and some idea can be formed of the sea of trouble, doubt, questioning, and anxiety into which a bright, sensitive, imaginative, and piously disposed lad of^eventeen was thrown when he had begun his student life in Erfurt.

When we piece together references in correspondence to Luther's student life, recollections of his fellow-students, and scattered sayings of his own in after-life, we get upon the whole the idea of a very levelheaded youth, with a strong sense of the practical side of his studies, thoroughly respected by his professors, refusing to be carried away into any excess of humanist enthusiasm on the one hand or of physical dissipation on the other; intent only to profit by the educational advantages within his reach and to justify the sacrifices which his father was making on his behalf. He had been sent to Erfurt to become a jurist, and the faculty of Philosophy afforded the preparation for the faculty of Law as well as of Theology. Luther accordingly began the course of study prescribed in the faculty of Philosophy- Logic, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, followed by Physics and Astronomy, the teaching in all cases consisting of abstract classification and distinctions without any real study of life or of fact. The teacher he most esteemed was John Trutvetter, the famed "Erfurt Doctor" whose fame and genius, as all good Germans thought, had made Erfurt as well-known as Paris. Scholasticism, he said, left him little time for poetry and classical studies. He does not seem to have attended any of the humanist lectures. But he read privately a large number of the Latin classical authors. Virgil, whose pages he opened with some dread,—for was he not in medieval popular legend a combination of wizard and prophet of Christ?-became his favourite author. His peasant upbringing made him take great delight in the Bucolics and Georgics-books, he said, that only a herd and a countryman can rightly understand. Cicero charmed him; he delighted in his public labours for his country and in his versatility, and believed him to be a much better philosopher than Aristotle. He read Livy, Terence, and Plautus. He prized the pathetic portions of Horace but esteemed him inferior to Prudentius. He seems also to have read from a volume of selections portions of Propertius, Persius, Lucretius, Tibullus, Silvius Italicus, Statius, and Claudian. We hear of him studying Greek privately with John Lange. But he was never a member