"They painted Christ," says Luther--and such pictures can still be seen in old churches--"sitting on a rainbow with his Mother and John the Baptist on either side as intercessors against his frightful wrath." At thirteen he was sent away to Magdeburg to a charitable school, and the next year to Eisenach, where he spent three years in study.

He contributed to his support by the then recognized means of begging, and was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta.

In 1501 he matriculated at the old and famous university of Erfurt.

[Sidenote: Erfurt] The curriculum here consisted of logic, dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics.

There was some natural science, studied not by the experimental method, but wholly from the books of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, and there were also a few courses in literature, both in the Latin classics and in their later imitators.