Luther on Gal. 6 (AE 27:123): Only now do we understand how necessary this commandment of Paul’s about providing for the ministers of the churches really was. There is nothing that Satan can bear less than the light of the Gospel. When it shines, he becomes furious and tries with all his might to extinguish it. He attempts this in two ways: first, by the deceit of heretics and the might of tyrants; secondly, by poverty and famine. Because Satan has been unable thus far to suppress the Gospel in our territories through heretics and tyrants, he is now trying the second way; he is depriving the ministers of the Word of their livelihood, so that poverty and famine will force them to forsake their ministry, and the unfortunate people, deprived of the Word, will eventually degenerate into animals. To make this dreadful evil come more quickly, Satan is vigorously pressing it through wicked magistrates in the cities and nobles in the country, who are seizing and misappropriating the possessions of the churches, from which the ministers of the Gospel should get their living. “From the hire of a harlot,” says the prophet Micah (1:7), “she gathered her possessions, and to the hire of a harlot they shall return.” In addition, Satan leads even good men away from the Gospel by means of satiety. A constant and daily attention to the Word makes it cloying and contemptible to many, who then gradually become neglectful in the practice of all the duties of godliness. No one nowadays is bringing up his children in the knowledge of good literature, much less of sacred literature, but only in ways of making a living. All these are efforts by Satan for suppressing the Gospel in our territories, and that without the might of tyrants or the deceit of heretics.
“Now I have preached and written a great deal urging that good schools should be established in the cities in order that we might produce educated men and women, whence good Christian pastors and preachers might come forth so that the word of God might continue to flourish richly. But people take such an indifferent attitude toward the matter, pretending that it might cost them their whole livelihood and temporal possessions, that I fear the time will come when schoolmasters, pastors, and preachers alike will have to quit, let the word go, and turn to a trade or some other means of stilling the pangs of hunger; just as the Levites had to abandon the worship of God to till the fields, as Nehemiah writes [Neh. 13:10].” Martin Luther, “Exposition of Psalm 127, for the Christians at Riga in Livonia,” Luther’s Works, vol. 45, p. 318.
What Luther Says, p. 923, #2897.