Luther wrote, “Thus, even in worldly government, you can serve your lord or your city better by training children than by building him castles and cities and gathering the treasures of the whole world; for what good does all that do if there are no learned, wise, and godly people? I shall say nothing of the temporal gain and eternal reward that accrue to you before God and the world, how in this way your child will be even better fed than by raising him in the shameful, despicable, hoggish way you had intended. But I shall deal with this matter more fully another time in a separate book, God willing, in which I shall really go after the shameful, despicable, damnable parents who are no parents at all but despicable hogs and venomous beasts, devouring their own young.”
Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 46: The Christian in Society III, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 210–211.