But the main fault and failing which he recognised in after life,
and which, as he tells us, was a source of inward suffering to him
from childhood, was the distorted view, held up to him at school and
from the pulpit, of the conditions of Christian salvation, and,
consequently, of his own proper religious attitude and demeanour.

Luther himself, as we learn from him later life, would have
Christian children brought up in the happy assurance that God is a
loving Father, Christ a faithful Saviour, and that it is their
privilege and duty to approach their Father with frank and childlike
confidence, and, if aroused to a consciousness of sin or wrong, to
entreat at once His forgiveness. Such however, he tells us, was not
what he was taught. On the contrary, he was instructed, and trained
up from childhood in that narrowing conception of Christianity, and
that outward form of religiousness, against which, more than
anything, he bore witness as a Reformer.

God was pictured to him as a Being unapproachably sublime, and of
awful holiness; Christ, the Saviour, Mediator, and Advocate, whose
revelation can only bring judgment to those who reject salvation, as
the threatening Judge, against whose wrath, as against that of God,
man sought for intercession and mediation from the Virgin and the
other saints. This latter worship, towards the close of the middle
ages, had increased in importance and extent. Peculiar honour was
paid to particular saints, in particular places, and for the
furtherance of particular interests. The warlike St. George was the
special saint of the town and county of Mansfeld: his effigy still
surmounts the entrance to the old school-house. Among the miners the
worship of St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin, soon became popular