0, 2, 334.)

Also in the chart booklets for the Latin schools of the Middle Ages the
Ave Maria and Salve Regina played an important part.--Such were the
books which, before Luther, were to serve the people as catechisms, or
books of instruction and prayer. In them, everything, even what was
right and good in itself, such as the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the
Decalog, was made to serve Romish superstition and work-righteousness.
Hence one can easily understand why Luther demanded that they be either
thoroughly reformed or eradicated.

Indeed, the dire need of the Church in this respect was felt and
lamented by none sooner and more deeply than Luther. Already in his
tract _To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,_ 1520, he
complained that Christian instruction of the young was being neglected.
He writes: "Above all, the chief and most common lesson in the higher
and lower schools ought to be the Holy Scriptures and for the young
boys, the Gospel. Would to God every city had also a school for girls,
where the little maids might daily hear the Gospel for an hour, either
in German or in Latin! Truly, in the past the schools and convents for
men and women were founded for this purpose, with very laudable
Christian intention, as we read of St. Agnes and other saints. There
grew up holy virgins and martyrs, and Christendom fared very well. But
now it amounts to nothing more than praying and singing. Ought not,
indeed, every Christian at the age of nine or ten years know the entire
holy Gospel, in which his name and life is written? Does not the spinner
and the seamstress teach the same handicraft to her daughter when she is
still young? But now even the great men, the learned prelates and
bishops, do not know the Gospel. How unjustly do we deal with the poor
youth entrusted to us, failing, as we do, to govern and instruct them!
What a severe reckoning will be required of us because we do not set
before them the Word of God! For unto them is done as Jeremiah says,
Lam. 2, 11. 12: 'Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled,
my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter
of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the
streets of the city. They say to their mothers, Where is corn and wine?
when they swooned as the wounded in the streets of the city, when their
soul was poured out into their mothers' bosom.' But we do not see the
wretched misery, how the young people, i