In the event, the Bible, together with Luther’s Catechism which had to be committed to memory, and the hymn-book, became the chief manuals in the Lutheran schools. On these elements a large portion of the young generation of Germany was brought up. For the study of languages Luther, like Melanchthon, recommended the “_Disticha_” ascribed to Cato and Æsop’s Fables. “It is by the special mercy of God,” he says, “that Cato’s booklet and the Fables of Æsop have been preserved in the schools.”[55] We shall describe elsewhere the efforts he himself made to expurgate the editions of Æsop which had become corrupted by additions offensive to good morals. Various Latin classics which Humanists were wont to put in the hands of the scholars he characterised in his Table-Talk as unsuitable for school use. “It would be well that the books of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus and also Virgil’s ‘_Priapeia_’ were weeded out of the land and the schools, banished and expelled, for they contain coarse and shameless things such as the young cannot study without grievous harm.”[56] Of the Roman writers (with the Greeks he is much less at home) he extols Cicero, Terence and Virgil as useful and improving. As a whole, however, Luther always remained “at heart a stranger to true Humanism.… Though not altogether inappreciative of elegance of style, he is far from displaying the enthusiasm of the Humanists.”[57] Although he shows himself fairly well acquainted with the writings of the three authors just mentioned, and though he owed this education to his early training, yet, in his efforts to belittle the olden schools, he complains, that “no one had taught him to read the poets and historians,” but, that, on the other hand, he had been obliged to study the “devil’s ordure and the philosophers.”[58] It must not be overlooked that he, like the Instructions for the Visitors, recommends that Terence and other olden dramatists should be given to the young to be read, and even acted, though, as he admits, they “sometimes contain obscenities and love stories.” This advice he further emphasised in 1537 by declaring that a Protestant schoolmaster of Bautzen was in the right, when, regardless of the scandal of many, he had Terence’s “_Andria_” performed. Luther agreed with Melanchthon in thinking that the picture of morals given in this piece was improving for the young; also that the disclosure of the “cunning of women, particularly of light women,” was instructive; the boys would thus learn how marriages were arranged, and, after all, marriage was essential for the continuance of society: Even Holy Scripture contained some love stories. “Thus our people ought not to accuse these plays of immorality or declare that to read or act them was prohibited to a Christian.”[59]