Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/57

ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 45 Elector of Saxony, when a boy of eight or nine, used often to beg his father to allow him to go to ' Cate- chism ' with the children of the town of Torgau, ' for it amused his youthful " Highness " to hear one child teaching and catechising another.' The oldest regular catechism known to us is that called the ' Christen-spiegel ' (' Mirror of the Christian '),. drawn up by the great popular preacher Diedrich Coelde, a Friar-Minor of Minister, in Westphalia. It was first published in Low German in the year 1470,. and was gradually brought out and disseminated in other editions. It is so simple, intelligible, and for- cible that it could be used now with as much profit as four hundred years ago. The one leading thought from beginning to end is — ' Jesus my all ! All for Jesus ! ' After an exposition of the general principles of the faith, he deals with the Apostles' Creed, the two great commandments of love to God and to our neigh- bour, the Decalogue, and the five commandments of the Church. ' Seeing that faith is the foundation of virtue and the beginning of human holiness' (such are the opening lines), ' it is necessary and profitable to repeat our Creed daily with our lips and to meditate in our hearts on it. And not only are we bound to believe the twelve articles of the Apostles' Creed, but also that which is revealed to us in the Scriptures and commanded by the Church.' On the first commandment he adds the following com- mentary : ' Man must place all his faith, all his hope, and all his love on God alone, and on no creature besides. It is a sin against the first commandment to place our faith or hope or love more in the saints than in God.'