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For it is plain that what is now a matter of hearsay at Mohra was a story wholly unknown there not many years ago, was first introduced by strangers, and has since met with several variations at their hands.
Firmly and resolutely, for many generations, and amidst grievous persecutions and disorders, such as visited Mohra in particular during the Thirty Years' War, this race maintained its ground.
The matter stands thus: In Luther's lifetime his Catholic opponent Witzel happened to call out to Jonas, a friend of Luther's, in the heat of a quarrel, 'I might call the father of your Luther a murderer. Twenty years later the anonymous author of a polemical work which appeared at Paris actually calls the Reformer 'the son of the Mohra assassin. With these exceptions, not a trace of any story of this kind, in the writings of either friend or foe, can be found in that or in the following century.
They were probably subject at intervals to the periodical visitation of alarms of witches, when whole races of men became wild with the infection without any one's being well able to account for it. In the year 1670, and one or two preceding years, there was a great alarm of witches in the town of Mohra. There were always two or three witches existing in some of the obscure quarters of this place.
It has been repeatedly asserted, in recent times, and even by Protestant writers, that the father of our great Reformer had sought to escape the consequences of a crime committed by him at Mohra.
It was at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in an official report on mining at Mohra, that the story, evidently based on oral tradition, assumed all at once a more definite shape; the statement being that Luther's father had accidentally killed a peasant, who was minding some horses grazing.
Near this house stands now a statue of Luther in bronze. At Mohra, then, Luther's father, Hans, had grown up to manhood. His grandfather's name was Henry, but of him we hear nothing during Luther's time. His grandmother died in 1521.
At least such they were in 1520, one hundred and fifty years before the date of the story we are going to recount. The site of these events was at Mohra and Elfdale in the province that has just been mentioned.
His parents, poor mine-laborers in a village of that region, named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben Winter-Fair: in the tumult of this scene the Frau Luther was taken with travail, found refuge in some poor house there, and the boy she bore was named MARTIN LUTHER. Strange enough to reflect upon it.
From Eisenach, whilst Swaven, Schurf, and several other of his companions went straight on, he struck southward, together with Amsdorf and Brother Pezensteiner, in order to go and see his relations at Mohra. Here, after spending the night at the house of his uncle Heinz, he preached the next morning, Saturday, May 4.
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