Languages enable us “to understand Holy Scripture,” he says, “this was well known to the monasteries and universities of the past, hence they had always frowned on the study of languages”; the devil was afraid that languages would make a hole “which afterwards it would not be easy for him to plug.” But the providence of God has outreached him, for, by “making over Greece to the Turks and sending the Greeks into exile, their language was spread abroad and an impetus was given even to the study of other tongues.” And now, thanks to the languages, the Gospel has been restored to its “earlier purity.” Hence, for the sake of the Bible and the Word of God, let us hark back to the languages. His excellent observations on the importance of the study of languages for those in secular authority, though perfectly honest, hold merely a secondary place. The chief use of the languages is as a weapon against the Papacy. “The dearer the Evangel is to us, the more let us hold fast to the languages!” So anxious is he to see the future schools thoroughly “Christian,” i.e. Evangelical and all devoted to the service of his cause, that he expressly states that otherwise he “would rather that not a single boy learnt anything but remained quite dumb.” Hence the earlier “universities and monasteries” must be made an end of. Their way of teaching and living “is not the right one for the young.” “It is my earnest opinion, prayer and wish that these donkey-stables and devil-schools should either sink into the abyss or else be transformed into Christian schools. But now that God has bestowed His grace upon us so richly and provided us with so many well able to teach and bring up the young, we are actually in danger of flinging the grace of God to the winds.” “I am of opinion that Germany has never heard so much of God’s Word as now.… God’s Word is a streaming downpour, the like of which must not be expected again.”[39] Hence the two writings differ but little from his usual polemical and hortatory works. They do not make of Luther the “father of the national schools,” as he has been erroneously termed, because, what he was after was not the real education of the masses but something rather different; still less do the booklets, with their every page reeking of the Word of God which he preached, make him the father of the modern undenominational schools.[40] In fact, elementary schools as such have scarcely any place in these writings. What concerns him is rather the Latin grammar schools, and only as an afterthought does he passingly allude to the other schools in which children receive their first grounding.[41] Luther’s standpoint as to the Church’s need of Grammar Schools is always the same, even when he speaks of them in the Table-Talk.