The religion taught by parents to children in pious German families seems to have been simple, unaffected and evangelical. Myconius relates how his father, a burgher, was accustomed to expound the Apostles' Creed to the boy and to tell him that Jesus Christ was the Saviour from all sins; that the one thing needed to obtain God's pardon for sins was to pray and to trust; and how he insisted above all that the forgiveness of God was a free gift, bestowed without fee by God on man for the sake of what Christ had done. Little books suitable for family instruction were in circulation in which were printed the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and sometimes one or two Psalms in the German tongue. Simple catechisms and other small books of devotion seem to have been in circulation which were full of very simple evangelical teaching. It is probable that Luther repeated a great deal of what was commonly taught to children in his own earliest years, when, in later days, he himself wrote little books for the young. Traces of this simple family piety, which insisted that all holiness came from "trusting in the holy passion of Christ," and that nothing which the sinner could do for himself availed anything, may be found all down the stream of medieval religious life in the most popular hymns and in the sermons of the great revival preachers.
The latter half of the fifteenth century saw the growth of a form of piety very different from that simple household religion. A strange terror seemed to brood over the people. The plague came periodically into the crowded and badly drained towns; new diseases made their appearance and added to the prevailing fear; the dread of a Turkish invasion seemed to be prevalent-mothers scared their children by naming the Turks, and in hundreds of German parishes the bells tolled in the village steeples calling the people to pray to God to deliver them from Turkish raids. This prevailing fear bred a strange restlessness. Crowds of pilgrims thronged the highways, trudging from shrine to shrine, hoping to get deliverance from fear and assurance of pardon for sins. Princes who could afford a sufficiently large armed guard visited the holy places in Palestine and brought back relics which they stored in their private chapels; the lesser nobility and the richer burghers made pilgrimages to Rome, especially during the Jubilee years, which became somewhat frequent in the later Middle Ages, and secured indulgences by visiting and praying before the several shrines in the Holy City, For the common folk of Germany, in the last decades of the fifteenth century, the favourite place of pilgrimage was Compostella in Spain, and, in the second degree, Einsiedeln in Switzerland. It was said that the bones of St James the Brother of our Lord had been brought from Palestine to Compostella; and the shrine numbered its pilgrims by the hundred thousand a year. So famous and frequented was this place of pilgrimage that a special, one might almost say a professional, class of pilgrims came into existence, the Jacobsbrüder, who were continually on the roads
