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Rh of his life preserved his bitterness against natural reason. Innumerable other preachers began to vie with each other in pouring forth virulent abuse against all enlightened knowledge and secular learning.

Can we then wonder that the parents, prejudiced by such inflammatory declamations, became averse not only to higher learning, as it had existed before the religious disturbances, but to schools in general? No wonder that the lower schools also began to be neglected, so that contemporary writers say: "About the year 1525 schools began to decline, and no one wanted to send his children to school, as people had heard so much from Luther's writings of how the priests and the learned had so pitiably seduced mankind." The official report of the inspectors of the district of Wittenberg, the centre and starting point of Luther's "reform", informs us in the year 1533: "The city schools which, in addition to the instruction they imparted, had given the children a material maintenance, are alarmingly decreasing."

Luther himself was appalled at this desolation, for he knew full well the importance of the school. With bitter invective and reproach he lashes the indifference of the people and the avarice of the princes who, after having squandered the property of the Church and the funds of the schools, refused to do anything for establishing new schools or even for maintaining those in existence. "Formerly", he says, "when we were the slaves of Satan, and profaned the blood of Christ,