23 April 2013

Real Work

Luther: 
Workers with brawn are prone to despise workers with brain, such as city secretaries and schoolteachers. The soldier boasts that it is hard work to ride in armor and endure heat, frost, dust, and thirst. But I'd like to see a horseman who could sit the whole day and look into a book. It is no great trick to hang two legs over a horse. They say writing is just pushing a feather, but I notice that they hang swords on their hips and feathers in high honor on their hats. Writing occupies not just the fist or the foot while the rest of the body can be singing or jesting, but the whole man.

As for schoolteaching, it is so strenuous that no one ought to be bound to it for more than ten years. 
-Martin Luther, as quoted in Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Hendrickson, 1977), 235

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