In this letter, as in both his works on the schools, Luther, whilst dealing with the excuses of the parents, at the same time throws some interesting sidelights on the decline in learning and its causes. _The Decline of the Schools Following in the Wake of the Innovations_ In the above letter to Metzsch Luther briefly gives as follows the principal reason for the decay of learning: People were in the habit of saying, “If my son has learnt enough to gain his living then he is quite learned enough.”[70] The contempt for learned studies was “largely due to the strongly utilitarian temper of the age.” “Owing in the first place to the flourishing state of the towns in the 13th and 14th century, and further to the influence of the great political upheaval which resulted from the discoveries and inventions of the day, a sober, practical spirit, directed solely to material gain, had been aroused throughout a wide section of the German nation. Preference was shown for the German schools where writing and reckoning were taught and which prepared children for the calling of the handicraftsman or the merchant.”[71] Against this tendency of the day Luther enters the lists particularly in his second work on the schools dedicated to the syndic of Nuremberg; at the same time he deals, not in the best of tempers, with the objections advanced by the merchant and industrial classes.[72] He speaks so harshly as almost to place in the same category those who refused to bring up their children “to art and learning” and those who turned them “into mere gluttons and sucking pigs, intent on food alone” (to Metzsch). “The world would thus become nothing but a pig-sty”; these “gruesome, noxious, poisonous parents were bent on making simple belly servers of their children,” etc.[73] It is a question, however, whether the development of the material trend, so surprisingly rapid, with its destructive influence on study was not furthered by the religious revolution with which it coincided. Luther had sapped the respect which had obtained for the clerical life and for those callings which aimed at perfection, while at the same time, by belittling good works he loosened the inclinations of the purely natural man; by his repudiation of authority he had produced an intellectual self-sufficiency or rather self-seeking, which, in the case of many, passed into mere material egotism, though, of course, Luther’s work cannot be directly charged with the utilitarianism of the day.