A peculiarly reverential demeanour, in regard to religion and the Church, is observable in Luther's father, and one which was common no doubt among his honest, simple, pious fellow townsfolk. His conduct was consistently God-fearing. In his house it was afterwards told how he would often pray at the bedside of his little Martin,--how, as the friend of godliness and learning, he had enjoyed the friendship of priests and school-teachers. Words of pious reflection from his lips remained stamped on Luther's memory from his boyhood. Thus Luther tells us, in a sermon preached towards the close of his life, how he had often heard his dear father say, that, as his own parents had told him, the earth contains many more who require to be fed than there are sheaves, even if collected from all the fields in the world; and yet how wondrously does God know how to preserve mankind! In common with his fellow-townsmen, he followed the precepts and commands of his Church. When, in the year in which he sent his son to Magdeburg, two new altars in the church at Mansfeld were consecrated to a number of saints, and sixty days' indulgence was granted to anyone who heard mass at them, Hans Luther, with Reinicke and other fellow-magistrates, was among the first to make use of the invitation. The enemies of the Reformer, while fain to trace his origin to a heretic Bohemian, had not a shadow of a reason for suspecting his real father of any leanings to heresy. Nor do we hear a word in later years from the Reformer, after his father had separated with him from the Catholic Church, to show a trace of any hostile or critical remark against that Church, remembered from the lips of his father during childhood. Quietly but firmly the latter asserted his own judgment, and framed his will accordingly. He was firm, in particular, in the consciousness of his paternal rights and duties, even against the pretensions of the clergy. Thus, as his son Martin tells us, when he lay once on the point of death, and the priest admonished him to leave something to the clergy, he replied in the simplicity of his heart, 'I have many children: I will leave it them, for they want it more.' We shall see how unyieldingly, when his son entered a convent, he insisted, as against all the value and usefulness of monasticism, on the paramount obligation of God's command, that children should obey their parents. Luther also tells us how his father once praised in high terms the will left by a Count of Mansfeld, who without leaving any property to the Church, was content to depart from this world trusting solely to the bitter sufferings and death of Christ, and commending his soul to Him. Luther himself, when a young student, would have considered, as he tells us, a bequest to churches or convents a proper will to make. His father afterwards accepted his son's doctrine of salvation without hesitation, and with the full conviction that it was right. But remarks of his such as we have