bend their wills, even though it costs labour and trouble, and leads
to threats and blows.

We have a reference by Luther to the lessons he learned in childhood
from his experience of poverty at home, in his remarks in later
life, on the sons of poor men, who by sheer hard work raise
themselves from obscurity, and have much to endure, and no time to
strut and swagger, but must be humble and learn to be silent and to
trust in God, and to whom God also has given good sound heads.

As to Luther's relations with his brothers and sisters we have the
testimony of one who knew the household at Mansfeld, and
particularly his brother James, that from childhood they were those
of brotherly companionship, and that from his mother's own account
he had exercised a governing influence both by word and deed on the
good conduct of the younger members of the family.

His father must have taken him to school at a very early age. Long
after, in fact only two years before his death, he noted down in the
Bible of a 'good old friend,' Emler, a townsman of Mansfeld, his
recollection how, more than once, Emler, as the elder, had carried
him, still a weakly child, to and from school; a proof, not indeed,
as a Catholic opponent of the next century imagined, that it was
necessary to compel the boy to go to school, but that he was still
of an age to benefit by being carried. The school-house, of which
the lower portion still remains, stood at the upper end of the
little town, part of which runs with steep streets up the hill. The
children there were taught not only reading and writing, but also
the rudiments of Latin, though doubtless in a very clumsy and
mechanical fashion. From his experience of the teaching here, Luther