Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/53

 ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 41 of these works which did not appear in several editions — often in five or six different places — at very short intervals. The sermons of the Dominican, Johann Herolt, for example, reached one hundred and forty- one editions, or forty thousand copies. These sermons, which were to be preached in the national tongue, were always written in Latin, and also, when published, printed in Latin. This was not sur- prising in an age when the clergy pursued their philosophic and theological studies in the latter language. The plan had this advantage at any rate, that when preachers borrowed sermons from other writers they were obliged to take the trouble to translate them for themselves. Ulrich Surgant, in his handbook of pastoral theology, dilates on the im- portance of ' doing this with intelligence, not satisfying themselves with literal translations, but taking pains to understand the spirit of their theme, and to master the local idioms in order to avoid giving a false or ambiguous rendering.' * The preachers in the towns often overrated the capacity of their hearers, and brought too much scholarship from their colleges to their pulpits. The 1 For further proof see Geffcken, pp. 10-14, also Kerker's second treatise, pp. 280-301. The old charge that the people were preached to in a language which they did not understand is a thing of the past. Even Schmidt, in writing on the subject, says : ' In Germany at the beginning of the fifteenth century there were priests who tried to instruct the people by reading aloud Latin orations.' For the truth of this statement he refers to Duprat, who says that at the Synod of Breslau in 1410 it was decreed that at every Latin sermon the Lord's Prayer and the Creed should, at any rate, be read in the vernacular. In the regulations in question, however, we hear no more about Latin preaching, only that the preacher must explain the Lord's Prayer, Ave, and Creed, on account, no doubt, of the mixed congregations of German and Polish. See Statuta Synodalia a Wen- ceslau episc. Wratis. a. 1410 publicata, Can. 17.