Martin Luther was born in 1483 (Nov. 10th) at Eisleben, and spent his childhood in the small mining town of Mansfeld. His father, Hans Luther, had belonged to Möhra (Moortown), a small peasant township lying in the north-east corner of the Thuringian Wald, and his mother, Margarethe Ziegler, had come from a burgher family in Eisenach. It was a custom among these Thuringian peasants that only one son, and that usually the youngest, inherited the family house and the croft. The others were sent out one by one, furnished with a small store of money from the family strong-box, to make their way in the world. Hans Luther had determined to become a miner in the Mansfeld district, where the policy of the Counts of Mansfeld, of building and letting out on hire small smelting furnaces, enabled thrifty and skilled workmen to rise in the world. The father soon made his way. He leased one and then three of these furnaces. He won the respect of his neighbours, for he became, in 1491, one of the four members of the village council, and we are told that the Counts of Mansfeld held him in esteem. In the earlier years, when Luther was a child, the family life was one of grinding poverty, and Luther often recalled the hard struggles of his parents. He had often seen his mother carrying the wood for the family fire from the forest on her poor shoulders. The child grew up among the hard, grimy, coarse surroundings of the German working-class life, protected from much that was evil by the wise severity of his parents. He imbibed its simple political and ecclesiastical ideas. He learned that the Emperor was God’s ruler on earth, who would protect poor people against the Turk, and that the Church was the “Pope’s House,” in which the Bishop of Rome was the house-father. He was taught the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. He sang such simple evangelical hymns as “Ein Kindelein so lobelich,” “Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist,” and “Crist ist erstanden.” He was a dreamy, contemplative child; and the unseen world was never out of his thoughts. He knew that some of the miners practised sorcery in dark corners below the earth. He feared an old woman who lived near; she was a witch, and the priest himself was afraid of her. He was taught about Hell and Purgatory and the Judgment to come. He shivered whenever he looked at the stained-glass window in the parish church and saw the frowning face of Jesus, who, seated on a rainbow and with a flaming sword in His hand, was coming to judge him, he knew not when. He saw the crowds of pilgrims who streamed past Mansfeld, carrying their crucifixes high, and chanting their pilgrim songs, going to the Bruno Quertfort chapel or to the old church at Wimmelberg. He saw paralytics and maimed folk carried along the roads, going to embrace the wooden cross at Kyffhaüser, and find a miraculous cure; and sick people on their way to the cloister church at Wimmelberg to be cured by the sound of the blessed bells.