# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 03 05_S109
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

109

give, and seek henceforth to make up again what you have hitherto neglected. Send your children diligently and regularly to school, willingly give your schoolmasters the hard-earned wage of their labor, which otherwise cries to God, and live peaceably with them. So shall the blessing of God rest upon your work; all that you do shall prosper, and in your well-bred children you shall experience honor and joy. God grant it for Christ's sake! Amen.

Written at Giessen, the 30th of March 1733.

Luther on the Education of Children.

It is not enough that married people beget children; it is also necessary that one bring up the fruit to the service, praise and honor of God. For married people should know that they cannot do any better work or service to God, to Christendom, to all the world, to themselves and to their children, than to bring up their children well. For this is their most direct road to heaven, and they cannot obtain heaven sooner or better than in this work. But on the other hand, hell is not more easily earned than through one's own children. Parents can do no more harmful work than to neglect their children, letting them curse, swear, learn shameful words and little songs, and live according to their own will. Besides this, some even incite them themselves with superfluous finery and advancement in the world, so that they may only please the world, rise high, and become rich, and so care more for the body than for the soul of the children. Nor is there any greater harm to Christendom than neglecting children. For if Christendom is to be helped again, one must in truth begin with the children. Therefore it is highly needful for every married person that he look to the soul of his child more and more diligently than to the flesh that has come from him, and regard his child as nothing other than a precious, eternal treasure committed to him by God to keep, that the devil, the world and the flesh may not steal it away nor destroy it. For it will be required of him at death and on the last day, with a very strict reckoning. For whence think you will come the dreadful howling and wailing of those who shall cry: Oh! blessed are the wombs that have not borne children! Luke 23:29. Without doubt from this, that they did not bring their children back to God, from whom they received them to keep.

The Lost and Found Again Son.

Johann Heermann of Köben, the well-known and gifted hymn-writer of our Church (born 1585, died 1647), had a son named Samuel. Of him we read the following in a periodical.

Before his birth Heermann had longed earnestly for children, but perhaps even more than he had ever dared to hope was granted him, when this son showed an obedient and pious disposition and uncommon gifts of mind, and when his diligence also rendered harmless the manifold interruptions of his instruction caused by domestic distress, disquiet and flight. He became his dearest child; but he was also to grieve him most painfully. In his sixteenth year he had been sent to school at Fraustadt, and in his eighteenth (summer of 1638) to the gymnasium of Maria Magdalena at Breslau. Here he followed in his father's footsteps and won general praise by orations and poems in Latin and German. But there he lodged with a Catholic and through him became acquainted with Jesuits. They became aware of his great eagerness to learn and his excellent abilities; they attempted to lure him into their net. His evangelical teachers at the gymnasium, they told him, did not give him enough attention, and also did not possess the necessary skill to advance him further. By this they succeeded in persuading him to leave the Magdalenen-Gymnasium without his father's knowledge and to go to the Jesuit school. Encouraged by this success, they redoubled their efforts, and finally prevailed upon him, on St. Matthias' Day (the 24th of February) 1640, to confess himself to the Catholic Church and to attend their worship. The high prize for which they had striven seemed won, and the son of an evangelical preacher, who was counted among the most renowned in Silesia, carried off from his Church. The unhappy father for a long time suspected and learned not a word of it, and when strangers at last reported to him that his son was associating with Jesuits and attending their school, how could he have believed it of his own son, and of such a son? Yet people spoke of it more and more, and with greater certainty, and the continued silence of the son confirmed these rumors. The father finally wrote to him and summoned him to come to him. But the Jesuits had expected this, and had already warned the son. "He was now no longer under paternal authority, he must not open any more the letters that came to him; he must bring them to them." It seems they did still more; for a Latin poem of the son in Heermann's poetic Erquickstunden, under which he is signed as a pupil of the Magdalenäum, assures the father: "He never thought of committing such a crime, had indeed been obedient to him from tender childhood, and would remain so as long as he lived, might neither remorse nor hellish torment be so dearly bought, he swore unbroken fidelity to him."

The father was not set at rest by this, but inquired further and at last learned from a letter of the son to a friend of his change of church. "God and his conscience," he said therein, "had moved him to it." In deep distress Heermann now asked him, on the 2nd of March 1640, whether he had really gone from the Evangelical school to the Jesuit school without his counsel and will, and urged him to come home once. "Come, come, my son," he cried to him tenderly, "thou shalt find a faithful father and a loving mother. Let me but see thy face once more, where thou wouldst behold the face of God!" Five days afterward he sent after this letter a "Faithful Admonition." It was as powerful in the grounds it set forth as it was moving in the entreaties with which it assailed the heart of the son. "As soon as God calls my soul away," he says therein of his seducers, "I will fall down before God's throne, and summon them within a year before his solemn judgment, and, shouldst thou not turn back, thee together with them; there shall ye answer to God and to me!" And of the son: "In thy letters thou hast always signed thyself: the Lord Father's most obedient son unto death. Shouldst thou break this promise, I would take thy fist with me before the judgment-seat of God, show it there, and ask for vengeance." The signature read: "Johann Heermann, whose soul is sorrowful unto death." — The loving command of the father raised the courage of the son above the prohibition of his seducers. He broke open and read these letters, he became full of disquiet, he went at once back to the Magdalenen school, and although they took him away from there by force that same evening, he nevertheless persisted in his change of mind and on the 9th of March returned to the evangelical faith. He had attended the Roman worship only 14 days, and had not yet confessed, not yet received the Lord's Supper. On the 16th of March he gladdened his father with this news, expressed the most heartfelt remorse over his deep fall, described at length how he had been led into it by a false interpretation of some passages and by intercourse with cunning men, begged God, begged his relatives and teachers earnestly for forgiveness, and swore to remain faithful to the Gospel henceforth unto death.

Sixteen long days had father, mother and brothers and sisters waited for this answer in indescribable anguish and uncertainty; it came at last and poured joy over all hearts. Heermann answered it by a long letter of comfort and instruction, and forgave him with joy. "Thy transgression," he said to him therein, "shall not be remembered against thee in malice. Trust my words. A father's heart remains a father's heart!"

At the end of March Samuel returned to his father's house. Heermann's descendants still had a tradition among themselves in the eighteenth century that the son had then needed a milk-bath in order to destroy the effects of a powder which had been administered to him in Breslau. Some words in his letter to his father of the 16th of March seem also to point to this. "What otherwise," he says therein, "with sweet wine in a gilded cup in the evening instead of a sleeping-draught