The condition of the schools before Luther, as described in our available sources, was very different from what Luther pictured to his readers in his works. According to Luther’s polemical writings, learning in earlier days could not but be sacrilegious because Satan “was corrupting the young” in “his own nests, the monasteries and clerical resorts”; “he, the prince of this world, gave the young his good things and delights; the devil spread out his nets, established monasteries, schools and callings, in such a way that no boy could escape him.”[105] With this fantastic view, met with only too frequently in Luther under all sorts of shapes, goes hand in hand his wholesale reprobation and belittling of the olden methods and system of education. The professors at the close of the Middle Ages were only able, according to Luther, to “train up profligates and greedy bellies, rude donkeys and blockheads; all they could teach men was to be asses and to dishonour their wives, daughters and maids.” “People studied twenty or forty years and yet at the end of it all knew neither Latin nor German.” “Those ogres and kidnappers” set up libraries, but they were filled “with the filth and ordure of their obscene and poisonous books”; “the devil’s spawn, the monks and the spectres of the Universities” when conferring doctorates decked out “great fat loutish donkeys in red and brown hoods, like a sow pranked out with gold chains and pearls.” “The pupils and professors were as mad as the books on which they lectured. A jackdaw does not hatch out doves nor can a fool beget wise offspring.” It is in his “An die Radherrn,” the object of which was to raise the standard of education, that we find such coarse language. What is of more importance is that Luther seems here to be seeking to conceal the decline in learning which he had brought about, and to lay the blame solely on the olden schools. If the corruption had formerly been so great then some excuse might be found for the ruin which had followed his struggle with the Church.—Such an excuse, however, does not tally with the facts.