days for the civil power had been exercised, and that for the good of the people, in the lands of Brandenburg and of Saxony before the close of the fifteenth century. We have therefore this new thing, that the laity in power had begun to set quietly aside the immunities and privileges of the Church, to this extent at least, that the civil authorities compelled the local ecclesiastical institutions within their dominions to live under the rule of reform laid down by an ecumenical council, and that they did this despite the remonstrances of the superior ecclesiastical authorities.
The same assertion of the rights of laymen to do Christian work in their own way appears when the records of the boroughs are examined. The whole charitable system of the Middle Ages had been administered by the Churchy all bequests for the relief of the poor had been placed in the hands of the clergy; and all donations for the çelief of the poor were given to clerical managers. The burghers saw the charitable bequests of their forefathers grossly perverted from their original purposes, and it began to dawn upon them that, although the law of charity was part of the law of Christ, it did not necessarily follow that all charities must be under ecclesiastical administration. Hence cases appear, and that more frequently as the years pass, where burghers leave their charitable bequests to be managed by the town council or other secular authority; and this particular portion of Christian work ceased to be the exclusive possession of the clergy.
Another feature of the times was the growth of an immense number of novel religious associations or confraternities. They were not, like the praying circles of the Mystics or of the Gottesfreunde, strictly non-clerical or anti-clerical; they had no objection to the protection of the Church, but they had a distinctively lay character. Some of them were associations of artisans; and these were commonly called Kalands, because it was one of their rules to meet once a month for divine service, usually in a chapel belonging to one of the mendicant Orders. Others bore curious names, such as St Ursula's Schifflein, and enforced a rule that all the members must pray a certain number of times a week. Pious people frequently belonged to a number of these associations. The members united for religious purposes, generally under the auspices of the Church; but they were confraternities of laymen and women who had marked out for themselves their own course of religious duties quite independently of the Church and of its traditional ideals. Perhaps no greater contribution could be made to our knowledge of the quiet religious life at the close of the fifteenth century than to gather together in a monograph what can be known about these religious confraternities.
Such was the religious atmosphere into which Luther was born and which he breathed from his earliest days. His mother taught him the simple evangelical hymns which had fed her own spiritual growth; his father had that sturdy common-sense piety which belonged to so many
