Nor was he the offspring of enfeebled, gouty, aristocratic blood. He
was the son of the sinewy and sturdy yeomanry. Though tradition
reports one of his remote ancestors in something of imperial place
among the chieftains of the semi-savage tribes from which he was
descended, when the period of the Reformation came his family was in
like condition with that of the house of David when the Christ was
born. His father and grandfather and great-grandfather, he says
himself, were true Thuringian peasants.


LUTHER'S EARLY TRAINING.

In the early periods of the mediæval Church her missionaries came to
these fiery warriors of the North and followed the conquests of
Charlemagne, to teach them that they had souls, that there is a living
and all-knowing God at whose judgment-bar all must one day stand to
give account, and that it would then be well with the believing,
brave, honest, true, and good, and ill with cowards, profligates, and
liars. It was a simple creed, but it took fast hold on the Germanic
heart, to show itself in sturdy power in the long after years.

This creed, in unabated force, descended to Luther's parents, and
lived and wrought in them as a controlling principle. They were also
strict to render it the same in their children.

_Hans Luther_ was a hard and stern disciplinarian, unsparing in the
enforcement of every virtue.

_Margaret Luther_[2] was noted among her neighbors as a model woman,