the labourer, was destined to wither beneath the
consecrating oil. It is true the marriage of priests had never entirely
ceased during the middle ages. There was even a cardinal who was
regularly married; his wife established herself with him, in spite of
the Pope and College of Cardinals, and was able, when weeping by the
side of the corpse, to relate to the sympathizing Romans the astounding
fact that her husband had been always true to her. And in Germany, the
housekeepers of the priests, the _Papemeiers_ of Reineke Fuchs, formed
a numerous and not unpretending class. But the country priests were
obliged to buy tolerance for such unions from the bishop and _curie_.
But however the higher ecclesiastical authorities may have favoured
such a system, it was considered as immoral by conscientious pastors,
and some even had scruples as to the propriety of their celebrating the
mass. But the people looked with hatred and scorn on these profligate
unions, and one of the greatest evils was, that the children remained
as long as they lived under the curse of their birth; hardly any branch
of trade was open to them; even the guilds of artisans would not
receive them. They became either working men or vagrants. Yet such
lasting unions of the Roman Catholic priests were generally, in the
time of Luther, a benefit to their parishes, for we see in hundreds of
pamphlets how recklessly the roving sensuality of the priests destroyed
the family life of their parishes. With the Protestants, on the
contrary, the ecclesiastical order became the medium by which the
countryman rose to a higher sphere of activity. By his village life and
little farm, the pastor became closely united with the peasantry, and
was at the same time the preserver of the highest education of those
centuries. So important has been the influence of the Protestant clergy
on the intellectual development of Germany, that the ancestors, even to
the third and fourth generation, of most of the great poets, artists,
and learned men, and the intellectual members of the German
bureaucracy, lived in a Protestant parsonage.

What follows will portray the life of a family which at the end of the
fifteenth century migrated from the village to the city, and in the
third generation became the ruling family in a great commercial town.
It may be seen from this narrative, that though family life was not
then deficient in hearty and naive cheerfulness, yet the conception of
life and du