462 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530.
widowed Countess of Mansfeld, sending greetings to Master Philip (Melanchthon), and quieting her apprehensions about his health.
‘* Pray read, dear Katie, the Gospel of John and the little Catechism. .. . You worry yourself about your God, just as if He were not Almighty, and able to create ten Doctor Martin Luthers for the old one drowned perhaps in the Saale, or fallen dead by the fireplace, or on Wolf’s fowling floor. Leave me in peace with your cares; I have a better protector than you and all the angels. He— my Protector —lies in the manger and hangs upon a Virgin’s breast, but He sits also at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. Rest, therefore, in peace. Amen.’’ 1
In his will (1542), seventeen years after his marriage, he calls her ἃ “ pious, faithful, and devoted wife, full of loving, tender care towards him.” At times, however, he felt oppressed by domestic troubles, and said once he would not marry again, not even a queen. ‘Those were passing moods. “Oh, how smoothly things move on, when man and wife sit lovingly at table! Though they have their little bickerings now and then, they must not mind that. Put up with it.” “We must have patience with woman, though she be at times sharp and bitter. She presides over the household machinery, and the servants deserve occasionally a good scolding.” He put the highest honor of woman on her motherhood. “ All men,” he said, “are conceived, born, and nursed by women. Thence come the little darlings, the highly prized heirs. This honor ought in fairness to cover up all feminine weakness.”
Luther had six children, — three daughters, two of whom died young, and three sons, Hans (John), Martin, and Paul. None inherited his genius. Hans gave him much trouble. Paul rose to some eminence as physician of the Elector, and died at Dresden, 1598. The sons accompanied their father on his last journey to Eisleben.? His wife’s aunt, Magdalen von Bora, who had been a nun and head-nurse in the same cloister, lived with his family, and was esteemed like a grand-
1 Feb. 7, 1546, in De Wette, V. 787. 2 Nobbe, Stammbaum der Familie des Dr. M. Luther, Grimma, 1846.
§ 78. LUTHER'S HOME-LIFE. 463
mother by him and his children. Two orphan nieces, and a tutor for the boys, an amanuensis, and a number of students as boarders, belonged to the household in a portion of the former convent on the banks of the Elbe. The chief sitting-room of the family, his bedroom, and the lecture hall are still shown in “the Lutherhaus.”
He began the day, after his private devotions, which were frequent and ardent, with reciting in his family the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and a Psalm. He went to bed at nine, but rose early, and kept wide awake during the day. Of his private devotions we have an authentic account from his companion, Veit Dietrich, who wrote to Melanchthon during the Diet of Augsburg, 1530, when Luther was at Coburg, feeling the whole weight of that great crisis : —
‘** No day passes that he does not give three hours to prayer, and those the fittest for study. Once I happened to hear him praying. Good God! how great a spirit, how great a faith, was in his very words! With such reverence did he ask, as if he felt that he was speaking with God; with such hope and faith, as with a Father and a Friend. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that Thou art our Father and our God. Iam certain, therefore, that Thou art about to destroy the persecutors of Thy children. If Thou doest not, then our danger is Thine too. This business is wholly Thine, we come to it under compulsion: Thou, therefore, defend.’ . . . In almost these words I, standing afar off, heard him praying with a clear voice. And my mind burned within me
with a singular emotion when he spoke in so friendly a manner, so weightily, so reverently, to God.”’
Luther celebrated the festivals, especially Christmas, with childlike joy. One of the most familiar scenes of Christian family life in Germany is Luther with his children around the Christmas-tree, singing his own Christmas hymn: —
‘*Good news from heaven the angels bring, Glad tidings to the earth they ring.’’ 4
1 The Nativity hymn, — ** Yom Himmel hoch da komm ich her,”’ was written for his children in 1535. He abridged it in 1543: — “Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar.”