THE PROTESTANT LEGACY

The Lutheran university in Wittenberg was in danger of extinction, one of its professors acknowledged in 1801; but it could still take pride in the fact that Martin Luther's room in the ancient Augustinian cloister might have been the scene of the “first thoughts of Reformation.” The room itself had been preserved – a reminder of the heroic era when Wittenberg had been the center of the German Reformation, in a university that had long since reverted to the status of an intellectual backwater in a sleepy provincial town. From the late 1570s onward the cloister building housed a royal refectory, originally designed to provide two square meals per day to 150 students. The recipients were to be “children of the poor” who “are capable in terms of natural gifts of intelligence and other gifts” and “can accomplish something worthwhile in studies,” but “cannot attend a university because of their poverty or … cannot endure there long because of the great poverty and financial incapacity of their parents and kin.”

The cloister-turned-refectory is an appropriate landmark for the rise of a new clerical order in Protestant Germany and for the new and adapted forms of charity that created the order and replenished it from one generation to the next. Luther himself had pointed the way with his “school sermons” in 1524 and 1530, in response to a precipitate decline in attendance at town schools and universities. It was above all to ensure a large recruiting pool for the officialdom of church and state that he called for obligatory mass education.