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HISTORY OF PROTESTANTISM FROM THE DIET OF WORMS, 1521, TO THE AUGSBURG CONFESSION, 1530.

CHAPTER - THE GERHAN NEW TESTAMENT.

Man Silenced — God about to Speak — Political Complications — Truth in the Midst of Tempests — Luther in the Wartburg — Lessons taught him — Soliman — Relation of the Turk to the Reformation — Leo X. Dies — Adrian of Utrecht — What the Romans think of their New Pope — Adrian’s Reforms — Luther’s Idleness — Commences the Translation of the New Testament — Beauty of the Translation — A Second Revelation — Phantoms.

PICTURE: Henry VIII.

PICTURE: View in Thuringia: the Wartburg in the Distance THE history of the Reformation in Germany once more claims our consideration. The great movement of the human soul from bondage, which so grandly characterised the sixteenth century, we have already traced in its triumphant march from the cell of the Augustine monk to the foot of the throne of Charles V., from the door of the Schlosskirk at Wittenberg to the gorgeous hall of Worms, crowded with the powers and principalities of Western Europe.

The moment is one of intensest interest, for it has landed us, we feel, on the threshold of a new development of the grand drama. On both sides a position has been taken up from which there is no retreat; and a collision, in which one or other of the parties must perish, now appears inevitable.

The new forces of light and liberty, speaking through the mouth of their chosen champion, have said, “Here we stand, we cannot go back.” The old forces of superstition and despotism, interpreting themselves through their representatives, the Pope and the emperor, have said with equal emphasis, “You shall not advance.”

The hour is come, and the decisive battle which is to determine whether liberty or bondage awaits the world cannot be postponed. The lists have been set, the combatants have taken their places, the signal has been given; another moment and we shall hear the sound of the terrible blows, as they echo and re-echo over the field on which the champions close in deadly strife. But instead of the shock of battle, suddenly a deep stillness descends upon the scene, and the combatants on both sides stand motionless. He who looketh on the sun and it shineth not has issued His command to suspend the conflict. As of old “the cloud” has removed and come between the two hosts, so that they come not near the one to the other.

But why this pause? If the battle had been joined that moment, the victory, according to every reckoning of human probabilities, would have remained with the old powers. The adherents of the new were not yet ready to go forth to war. They were as yet immensely inferior in numbers.

Their main unfitness, however, did not lie there, but in this, that they lacked their weapons. The arms of the other were always ready. They leaned upon the sword, which they had already unsheathed. The weapon of the other was knowledge—the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. That sword had to be prepared for them: the Bible had to be translated; and when finally equipped with this armor, then would the soldiers of the Reformation go forth to battle, prepared to withstand all the hardships of the campaign, and finally to come victorious out of the “great fight of afflictions” which they were to be called, though not just yet, to wage.

If, then, the great voice which had spoken in Germany, and to which kings, electoral princes, dukes, prelates, cities and universities, had listened, and the mighty echoes of which had come back from far-distant lands, was now silent, it was that a Greater voice might be heard. Men must be prepared for that voice. All meaner sounds must be hushed. Man had spoken, but in this silence God Himself was to speak to men, directly from His own Word.

Let us first cast a glance around on the political world. It was the age of great monarchs. Master of Spain, and of many other realms in both the Eastern and the Western world, and now also possessor of the imperial diadem, was the taciturn, ambitious, plodding, and politic Charles V.

Francis I., the most polished, chivalrous, and war-like knight of his time, governed France. The self-willed, strong-minded, and cold-hearted Henry VIII. was swaying the scepter in England, and dealing alternate blows, as humor and policy moved him, to Rome and to the Reformation. The wise Frederick was exercising kingly power in Saxony, and by his virtues earning a lasting fame for himself, and laying the foundation of lasting power for his house. The elegant, self-indulgent, and sceptical Leo X. was master of the ceremonies at Rome. Asia owned the scepter of Soliman the Magnificent. Often were his hordes seen hovering, like a cloud charged with lightning, on the frontier of Christendom. When a crisis arose in the affairs of the Refomnation, and the kings obedient to the Roman See had united their swords to strike, and with blow so decisive that they should not need to strike a second time, the Turk, obeying One Whom he knew not, would straightway present himself on the eastern limits of Europe, and in so menacing an attitude, that the swords unsheathed against the poor Protestants had to be turned in another quarter. The Turk was the lightning-rod that drew off the tempest. Thus did Christ cover His little flock with the shield of the Moslem.

The material resources at the command of these potentates were immense.

They were the lords of the nations and the leaders of the armies of Christendom. It was in the midst of these ambitions and policies, that it seemed good to the Great Disposer that the tender plant of Protestantism should grow up. One wonders that in such a position it was able to exist a single day. The Truth took root and flourished, so to speak, in the midst of a hurricane. How was this? Where had it defense? The very passions that warred like great tempests around it, became its defense. Its foes were made to check and counter-check each other. Their furious blows fell not upon the truths at which they were aimed, and which they were meant to extirpate; they fell upon themselves. Army was dashed against army; monarch fell before monarch; one terrible tempest from this quarter met another terrible tempest from the opposite quarter, and thus the intrigues and assaults of kings and statesmen became a bulwark around the principle which it was the object of these mighty ones to undermine and destroy.

Now it is the arm of her great persecutor, Charles V., that is raised to defend the Church, and now it is beneath the shadow of Soliman the Turk that she finds asylum. How visible the hand of God! How marvellous His providence!

Luther never wore sword in his life, except when he figured as Knight George in the Wartburg, and yet he never lacked sword to defend him when he was in danger. He was dismissed from the Diet at Worms with two powerful weapons unsheathed above his head — the excommunication of the Pope and the ban of the emperor. One is enough surely; with both swords bared against him, how is it possible that he can escape destruction? Yet amid the hosts of his enemies, when they are pressing round him on every side, and are ready to swallow him up, he suddenly becomes invisible; he passes through the midst of them, and enters unseen the doors of his hiding-place.

This was Luther’s second imprisonment. It was a not less essential part of his training for his great work than was his first. In his cell at Erfurt he had discovered the foundation on which, as a sinner, he must rest. In his prison of the Wartburg he is shown the one foundation on which the Church must be reared—the Bible. Other lessons was Luther here taught. The work appointed him demanded a nature strong, impetuous, and fearless; and such was the temperament with which he had been endowed. His besetting sin was to under-estimate difficulties, and to rush on, and seize the end before it was matured. How different from the prudent, patient, and circumspect Zwingli! The Reformer of Zurich never moved a step till he had prepared his way by instructing the people, and carrying their understandings and sympathies with him in the changes he proposed for their adoption. The Reformer of Wittenberg, on the other hand, in his eagerness to advance, would not only defy the strong, he at times trampled upon the weak, from lack of sympathy and considerateness for their infirmities. He assumed that others would see the point as clearly as he himself saw it. The astonishing success that had attended him so far — the Pope defied, the emperor vanquished, and nations rallying to him—was developing these strong characteristics to the neglect of those gentler, but more efficacious qualities, without which enduring success in a work like that in which he was engaged is unattainable. The servant of the Lord must not strive. His speech must distil as the dew. It was light that the world needed. This enforced pause was more profitable to the Reformer, and more profitable to the movement, than the busiest and most successful year of labor which even the great powers of Luther could have achieved.

He was now led to examine his own heart, and distinguish between what had been the working of passion, and what the working of the Spirit of God. Above all he was led to the Bible. His theological knowledge was thus extended and ripened. His nature was sanctified and enrichched, and if his impetuosity was abated, his real strength was in the same proportion increased. The study of the Word of God revealed to him likewise, what he was apt in his conflicts to overlook, that there was an edifice to be built up as well as one to be pulled down, and that this was the nobler work of the two.

The sword of the emperor was not the only peril from which the Wartburg shielded Luther. His triumph at Worms had placed him on a pinnacle where he stood in the sight of all Christendom. He was in danger of becoming giddy and falling into an abyss, and dragging down with him the cause he represented. Therefore was he suddenly withdrawn into a deep silence, where the plaudits with which the word was ringing could not reach him; where he was alone with God; and where he could not but feel his insignificance in the presence of the Eternal Majesty.

While Luther retires from view in the Wartburg, let us consider what is passing in the world. All its movements revolve around the one great central movement, which is Protestantism. The moment Luther entered within the gates of the Wartburg the political sky became overcast, and dark clouds rolled up in every quarter. First Soliman, “whom thirteen battles had rendered the terror of Germany, 1 made a sudden eruption into Europe. He gained many towns and castles, and took Belgrad, the bulwark of Hungary, situated at the confluence of the Danube and the Save. The States of the Empire, stricken with fear, hastily assembled at Nuremberg to concert measures for the defense of Christendom, and for the arresting of the victorious march of its terrible invader. 2 This was work enough for the princes. The execution of the emperor’s edict against Luther, with which they had been charged, must lie over till they had found means of compelling Soliman and his hordes to return to their own land. Their swords were about to be unsheathed above Luther’s head, when lo, some hundred thousand Turkish scimitars are unsheathed above theirs!

While this danger threatened in the East, another suddenly appeared in the South. News came from Spain that seditions had broken out in that country in the emperor’s absence; and Charles V., leaving Luther for the time in peace, was compelled to hurry home by sea in order to compose the dissensions that distracted his hereditary dominions. He left Germany not a little disgusted at finding its princes so little obsequious to his will, and so much disposed to fetter him in the exercise of his imperial prerogative.

Matters were still more embroiled by the war that next broke out between Charles and Francis I. The opening scenes of the conflict lay in the Pyrenees, but the campaign soon passed into Italy, and the Pope joining his arms with those of the emperor, the Freneh lost the Duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Milan, which they had held for six years, and the misfortune was crowned by their being driven out of Lombardy. And now came sorrow to the Pope! Great was the joy of Leo X. at the expulsion of the French. His arms had triumphed, and Parma and Piacenza had been restored to the ecclesiastical State. 3 He received the tidings of this good fortune at his country seat of Malliana. Coming as they did on the back of the emperor’s edict proscribing Luther, they threw him into an ecstacy of delight. The clouds that had lowered upon his house appeared to be dispersing. “He paced backwards and forwards, between the window and a blazing hearth, till deep into the night—it was the month of November.” He watched the public rejoicings in honor of the victory. He hurried off to Rome, and reached it before the fetes there in course of celebration had ended. Scarce had he crossed the threshold of his palace when he was seized with illness. He felt that the hand of death was upon him. Turning to his attendants he said, “Pray for me, that I may yet make you all happy.” The malady ran its course so rapidly that he died without the Sacrament. The hour of victory was suddenly changed into the hour of death, and the feux-de-joie were succeeded by funeral bells and mornming plumes. Leo had reigned with magnificence—he died deeply in debt, and was buried amid manifest contempt. The Romans, says Ranke, never forgave him “for dying without the Sacraments. They pursued his corpse to its grove with insult and reproach. ‘Thou hast crept in like a fox,’ they exclaimed, ‘like a lion hast thou ruled us, and like a dog hast thou died.’” The nephew of the deceased Pope, Cardinal Giulio de Medici, aspired to succeed his uncle. But a more powerful house than that of Medici now claimed to dispose of the tiara. The monarchs of Spain were more potent factors in European affairs than the rich merchant of Florence. The conclave had lasted long, and Giulio de Medici, despairing of his own election, made a virtue of necessity, and proposed that the Cardinal of Tortosa, who had been Charles’s tutor, should be elevated to the Pontificate. The person named was unknown to the cardinals. He was a native of Utrecht. 6 He was entirely without ambition, aged, austere.

Eschewing all show, he occupied himself wholly with his religious duties, and a faint smile was the nearest approach he ever made to mirth. Such was the man whom the cardinals, moved by some sudden and mysterious impulse, or it may be responsive to the touch of the imperial hand, united in raising to the Papal chair. He was in all points the opposite of the magnificent Leo. Adrian VI. — for under this title did he reign—was of humble birth, but his talents were good and his conduct was exemplary. He began his public life as professor at Louvain. He next became tutor to the Emperor Charles, by whose influence, joined to his own merits, he was made Cardinal of Tortosa. He was in Spain, on the emperor’s business, when the news of his election reached him. The cardinals, who by this time were alarmed at their own deed, hoped the modest man would decline the dazzling post.

They were disappointed. Adrian, setting out for Rome with his old housekeeper, took possession of the magnificent apartments which Leo had so suddenly vacated. He gazed with indifference, if not displeasure, upon the ancient masterpieces, the magnificent pictures, and glowing statuary, with which the exquisite taste and boundless prodigality of Leo had enriched the Vatican. The “Laocoon” was already there; but Adrian turned away from that wonderful group, which some have pronounced the chef-d’oeuvre of the chisel, with the cold remark, “They are the idols of the heathen.” Of all the curious things in the vast museum of the Papal Palace, Adrian VI. was esteemed the most curious by the Romans. They knew not what to make of the new master the cardinals had given them.

His coming (August, 1522) was like the descent of a cloud upon Rome; it was like an eclipse at noonday. There came a sudden collapse in the gaeties and spectacles of the Eternal City. For songs and masquerades, there were prayers and beads. “He will be the ruin of us,” said the Romans of their new Pope. The humble, pious, sincere Adrian aspired to restore, not to overthrow the Papacy. His predecessor had thought to extinguish Luther’s movement by the sword; the Hollander judged that he had found a better way. He proposed to suppress one Reformation by originating another. He began with a startling confession: “It is certain that the Pope may err in matters of faith in defending heresy by his opinions or decretals.” 9 This admission, meant to be the starting-point of a moderate reform, is perhaps even more inconvenient at this day than when first made. The world long afterwards received the “Encyclical and Syllabus” of Pius IX., and the “Infallibility Decree” of July 18, 1870, which teach the exactly opposite doctrine, that the Pope cannot err in matters of faith and morals. If Adrian spoke true, it followsthat the Pope may err; if he spoke false, it equally follows that the Pope may err; and what then are we to make of the decree of the Vatican Council of 1870, which, looking backwards as well as forwards, declares that error is impossible on the part of the Pope?

Adrian wished to reform the Court of Rome as well as the system of the Papacy. 10 He set about purging the city of certain notorious classes, expelling the vices and filling it with the virtues. Alas! he soon found that he would leave few in Rome save himself. His reforms of the system fared just as badly, as the sequel will show us. If he touched an abuse, all who were interested in its maintenance—and they were legion—rose in arms to defend it. If he sought to loosen but one stone, the whole edifice began to totter. Whether these reforms would save Germany was extremely problematical: one thing was certain, they would lose Italy. Adrian, sighing over the impossibilities that surrounded him on every side, had to confess that this middle path was impracticable, and that his only choice lay between Luther’s Reform on the one hand, and Charles V.’s policy on the other. He cast himself into the arms of Charles.

Our attention must again be directed to the Wartburg. While the Turk is thundering on the eastern border of Christendom, and Charles and Francis are fighting with one another in Italy, and Adrian is attempting impossible reforms at Rome, Luther is steadily working in his solitude. Seated on the ramparts of his castle, looking back on the storm from which he had just escaped, and feasting his eyes on the quiet forest glades and well-cultivated valleys spread out beneath him, his first days were passed in a delicious calm. By-and-by he grew ill in body and troubled in mind, the result most probably of the sudden transition from intense excitement to profound inaction. He bitterly accused himself of idleness. Let us see what it was that Luther denominated idleness. “I have published,” he writes on the 1st of November, “a little volume against that of Catharinus on Antichrist, a treatise in German on confession, a commentary in German on the 67th Psalm, and a consolation to the Church of Wittenberg. Moreover, I have in the press a commentary in German on the Epistles and Gospels for the year; I have just sent off a public reprimand to the Bishop of Mainz on the idol of Indulgences he has raised up again at Halle; 11 and I have finished a commentary on the Gospel story of the Ten Lepers. All these writings are in German.” 12 This was the indolence in which he lived. From the region of the air, from the region of the birds, from the mountain, from the Isle of Patmos, from which he dated his letters, the Reformer saw all that was passing in the world beneath him. He scattered from his mountain-top, far and wide over the Fatherland, epistles, commentaries, and treatises, counsels and rebukes. It is a proof how alive he had become to the necessities of the times, that almost all his books in the Wartburg were written in German.

But a greater work than all these did Luther by-and-by set himself to do in his seclusion. There was one Book—the Book of books—specially needed at that particular stage of the movement, and that Book Luther wished his countrymen to possess in their mother tongue. He set about translating the New Testament from the original Greek into German; and despite his other vast labors, he prosecuted with almost superhuman energy this task, and finished it before he left the Wartburg. Attempts had been made in 1477, in 1490, and in 1518 to translate the Holy Bible from the Vulgate; but the rendering was so obscure, the printing so wretched, and the price so high, that few cared to procure these versions. 13 Amid the harassments of Wittenberg, Luther could not have executed this work; here he was able to do it. He had intended translating also the Old Testament from the original Hebrew, but the task was beyond his strength; he waited till he should be able to command learned assistance; and thankful he was that the same day that opened to him the gates of the Wartburg, found his translation of the New Testament completed.

But the work required revision, and after Luther’s return to Wittenberg he went through it all, verse by verse, with Melanchthon. By September 21, 1522, the whole of the New Testament in German was in print, and could be purchased at the moderate sum of a florin and a half. The more arduous task, of translating the Old Testament, was now entered upon. No source of information was neglected in order to produce as perfect a rendering as possible, but some years passed away before an entire edition of the Sacred Volume in German was forthcoming. Luther’s labors in connection with the Scriptures did not end here. To correct and improve his version was his continual care and study till his life’s end. For this he organised a synod or Sanhedrim of learned men, consisting of John Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Melanchthon, Cruciger, Aurogallus, and George Rover, with any scholar who might chance to visit Wittenberg. 14 This body met once every week before supper in the Augustine convent, and exchanged suggestions and decided on the emendations to be adopted. When the true meaning of the original had been elicited, the task of clothing it in German devolved on Luther alone.

The most competent judges have pronounced the highest eulogisms on Luther’s version. It was executed in a style of exquisite purity, vigor, and beauty. It fixed the standard of the language. In this translation the German tongue reached its perfection as it were by a bound. But this was the least of the benefits Luther’s New Testament in German conferred upon his nation. Like another Moses, Luther was taken up into this Mount, that he might receive the Law, and give it to his people. Luther’s captivity was the liberation of Germany. Its nations were sitting in darkness when this new day broke upon them from this mountain-top. For what would the Reformation have been without the Bible?—a meteor which would have shone for one moment, and the next gone out in darkness. “From the innumerable testimonies to the beauty of Luther’s translation of the Bible,” says Seckendorf, “I select but one, that of Prince George of Anhalt, given in a public assembly of this nation. ‘What words,’ said the prince, ‘can adequately set forth the immense blessing we enjoy in the whole Bible translated by Dr.

Martin Luther from the original tongues? So pure, beautiful, and clear is it, by the special grace and assistance of the Holy Spirit, both in its words and its sense, that it is as if David and the other holy prophets had lived in our own country, and spoken in the German tongue. Were Jerome and Augustine alive at this day, they would hail with joy this translation, and acknowledge that no other tongue could boast so faithful and perspicuous a version of the Word of God.We acknowledge the kindness of God in giving us the Greek version of the Septuagint, and also the Latin Bible of Jerome.

But how many defects and obscurities are there in the Vulgate!

Augustine, too, being ignorant of the Hebrew, has fallen into not a few mistakes. But from the version of Martin Luther many learned doctors have acknowledged that they had understood better the true sense of the Bible than from all the commentaries which others have written upon it.’” These manifold labors, prosecuted without intermission in the solitude of the Castle of the Wartburg, brought on a complete derangement of the bodily functions, and that derangement in turn engendered mental hallucinations. Weakened in body, feverishly excited in mind, Luther was oppressed by fears and gloomy terrors. These his dramatic idiosyncrasy shaped into Satanic forms. Dreadful noises in his chamber at night would awake him from sleep. Howlings as of a dog would be heard at his door, and on one occasion as he sat translating the New Testament, an apparition of the Evil One, in the form of a lion, seemed to be walking round and round him, and preparing to spring upon him. A disordered system had called up the terrible phantasm; yet to Luther it was no phantasm, but a reality. Seizing the weapon that came first to his hand, which happened to be his inkstand, 17 Luther hurled it at the unwelcome intruder with such force, that he put the fiend to flight, and broke the plaster of the wall. We must at least admire his courage.

CHAPTER - THE ABOLITION OF THE MASS.

Friar Zwilling — Preaches against the Mass — Attacks the Monastic Orders — Bodenstein of Carlstadt — Dispenses the Supper — Fall of the Mass at Wittenberg — Other Changes — The Zwickau Prophets — Nicholas Stork — Thomas Munzer — InfantBaptism Denounced — The New Gospel — Disorders at Wittenberg — Rumors wafted to the Wartburg — Uneasiness of Luther — He Leaves the Wartburg — Appears at Wittenberg — His Sermon — A Week of Preaching — A Great Crisis — It is Safely Passed.

PICTURE: View of Luthers Room in the Wartburg, showing the Ink-stain on the Wall PICTURE: John Bugenhagen (Pomeranus) THE master-spirit was withdrawn, but the work did not stop. Events of great importance took place at Wittenberg during Luther’s ten months’ sojourn in the Wartburg. The Reformation was making rapid advances. The new doctrine was finding outward expression in a new and simpler worship. Gabriel Zwilling, an Augustine friar, put his humble hand to the work which the great monk had begun. He began to preach against the mass in the convent church the same in which Luther’s voice had often been heard.

The doctrine he proclaimed was substantially the same with that which Zurich was teaching in Switzerland, that the Supper is not a sacrifice, but a memorial. He condemned private masses, the adoration of the elements, and required that the Sacrament should be administered in both kinds. The friar gained converts both within and outside the monastery. The monks were in a state of great excitement. Wittenberg was disturbed. The court of the elector was troubled, and Frederick appointed a deputation consisting of Justus Jonas, Philip Melanchthon, and Nicholas Amsdorf, to visit the Augustine convent and restore peace. The issue was the conversion of the members of the deputation to the opinions of Friar Gabriel. 2 It was no longer obscure monks only who were calling for the abolition of the mass; the same cry was raised by the University, the great school of Saxony.

Many who had listened calmly to Luther so long as his teaching remained simply a doctrine, stood aghast when they saw the practical shape it was about to take. They saw that it would change the world of a thousand years past, that it would sweep away all the ancient usages, and establish an order of things which neither they nor their fathers had known. They feared as they entered into this new world.

The friar, emboldened by the success that attended his first efforts, attacked next the monastic order itself. He denounced the “vow” as without warrant in the Bible, and the “cloak” as covering only idleness and lewdness. “No one,” said he, “can be saved under a cowl.” Thirteen friars left the convent, and soon the prior was the only person within its walls.

Laying aside their habit, the emancipated monks betook them, some to handicrafts, and others to study, in the hope of serving the cause of Protestantism. The ferment at Wittenberg was renewed. At this time it was that Luther’s treatise on “Monastic Vows” appeared. He expressed himself in it with some doubtfulness, but the practical conclusion was that all might be at liberty to quit the convent, but that no one should be obliged to do so.

At this point, Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt, commonly called Carlstadt, Archdeacon of Wittenberg, came forward to take a prominent part in these discussions. Carlstadt was bold, zealous, honest, but not without a touch of vanity. So long as Luther was present on the scene, his colossal figure dwarfed that of the archdeacon; but the greater light being withdrawn for the time, the lesser luminary aspired to mount into its place. The “little sallow tawny man” who excelled neither in breadth of judgment, nor in clearness of ideas, nor in force of eloquence, might be seen daily haranguing the people, on theological subjects, in an inflated and mysterious language, which, being not easily comprehensible, was thought by many to envelope a rare wisdom. His efforts in the main were in the right direction. He objected to clerical and monastic celibacy, he openly declared against private masses, against the celebration of the Sacrament in one kind, and against the adoration of the Host.

Carlstadt took an early opportunity of carrying his views into practice. On Christmas Day, 1521, he dispensed the Sacrament in public in all the simplicity of its Divine institution. He wore neither cope nor chasuble.

With the dresses he discarded also the genuflections, the crossings, kissings, and other attitudinisings of Rome; and inviting all who professed to hunger and thirst for the grace of God, to come and partake, he gave the bread and the wine to the communicants, saying, “This is the body and blood of our Lord.” He repeated the act on New Year’s Day, 1522, and continued ever afterwards to dispense the Supper with the same simplicity. 3 Popular opinion was on his side, and in January, the Town Council, in concurrence with the University, issued their order, that henceforward the Supper should be dispensed in accordance with the primitive model. The mass had fallen.

With the mass fell many things which grew out of it, or leaned upon it. No little glory and power departed from the priesthood. The Church festivals were no longer celebrated. In the place of incense and banners, of music and processions, came the simple and sublime worship of the heart.

Clerical celibacy was exchanged for virtuous wedlock. Confessions were carried to that Throne from which alone comes pardon. Purgatory was first doubted, then denied, and with its removal much of the bitterness was taken out of death. The saints and the Virgin were discarded, and lo! as when a veil is withdrawn, men found themselves in the presence of the Divine Majesty. The images stood neglected on their pedestals, or were torn down, ground to powder, or cast into the fire. The latter piece of reform was not accomplished without violent tumults.

The echoes of these tumults reverberated in the Wartburg. Luther began to fear that the work of Reformation was being converted into a work of demolition. His maxim was that these practical reforms, however justifiable in themselves, should not outrun the public intelligence; that, to the extent to which they did so, the reform was not real, but fictitious: that the error in the heart must first be dethroned, and then the idol in the sanctuary would be cast out. On this principle he continued to wear the frock of his order, to say mass, to observe his vow as a celibate, and to do other things the principle of which he had renounced, though the time, he judged, had not arrived for dropping the form. Moderation was a leading characteristic of all the Reformers. Zwingli, as we have already seen, followed the same rule in Switzerland. His naive reply to one who complained of the images in the churches, showed considerable wisdom. “As for myself,” said Zwingli, “they don’t hurt me, for I am shortsighted.”

In like manner Luther held that external objects did not hurt faith, provided the heart did not hang upon them. Immensely different, however, is the return to these things after having been emancipated from them. At this juncture there appeared at Wittenberg a new set of reformers, who seemed bent on restoring human traditions, and the tyranny of man from a point opposite to that of the Pope. These men are known as the “Zwickau Prophets,” from the little town of Zwickau, in which they took their rise.

The founder of the new sect was Nicholas Stork, a weaver. Luther had restored the authority of the Bible; this was the corner-stone of his Reformation. Stork sought to displace this cornerstone. “The Bible,” said he, “is of no use.” And what did he put in the room of it? A new revelation which he pretended had been made to himself. The angel Gabriel, he affirmed, had appeared to him in a vision, and said to him, “Thou shalt sit on my throne.” A sweet and easy way, truly, of receiving Divine communications! as Luther could not help observing, when he remembered his own agonies and terrors before coming to the knowledge of the truth. Stork was joined by Mark Thomas, another weaver of Zwickau; by Mark Stubner, formerly a student at Wittenberg; and by Thomas Munzer, who was the preacher of the “new Gospel.” That Gospel comprehended whatever Stork was pleased to say had been revealed to him by the angel Gabriel. He especially denounced infant baptism as an invention of the devil, and called on all disciples to be re-baptised, hence their name “Anabaptists.” The spread of their tenets was followed by tumults in Zwickau. 6 The magistrates interfered: the new prophets were banished:

Munzer went to Prague; Stork, Thomas, and Stubner took the road to Wittenberg.

Stork unfolded gradually the whole of that revelation which he had received from the angel, but which he had deemed it imprudent to divulge all at once. The “new Gospel,” when fully put before men, was found to involve the overthrow of all established authority and order in Church and State; men were to be guided by an inward light, of which the new prophets were the medium. They foretold that in a few years the present order of things would be brought to an end, and the reign of the saints would begin. 7 Stork was to be the monarch of the new kingdom. Attacking Protestantism from apparently opposite poles, there was nevertheless a point in which the Romanists and the Zwickau fanatics met—namely, the rejection of Divine revelation, and the subjection of the conscience to human reason—the reason of Adrian VI., the son of the Utrecht mechanic, on the one side, and the reason of Nicholas Stork, the Zwickau weaver, on the other.

These men found disciples in Wittenberg. The enthusiasm of Carlstadt was heated still more; many of the youth of the University forsook their studies, deeming them useless in presence of an internal illumination which promised to teach them all they needed to know without the toil of learning. The Elector was dismayed at this new outbreak: Melanchthon was staggered, and felt himself powerless to stem the torrent. The enemies of the Reformation were exultant, believing that they were about to witness its speedy disorganization and ruin. Tidings reached the Wartburg of what was going on at Wittenberg. Dismay and grief seized Luther to see his work on the point of being wrecked. He was distracted between his wish to finish his translation of the New Testament, and his desire to return to Wittenberg, and combat on the spot the new-sprung fanaticism.

All felt that he alone was equal to the crisis, and many voices were raised for his return. Every line he translated was an additional ray of light, to fall in due time upon the darkness of his countrymen. How could he tear hinmelf from such a task? And yet every hour that elapsed, and found him still in the Wartburg, made the confusion and mischief at Wittenberg worse. At last, to his great joy, he finished his German version of the New Testament, and on the morning of the 3rd March, 1522, he passed out at the portal of his castle. He might be entering a world that would call for his blood; the ban of the Empire was suspended over him; the horizonwas black with storms; nevertheless he must go and drive away the wolves that had entered his fold. He traveled in his knight’s incognito—a red mantle, trunk-hose, doublet, feather, and sword—not without adventures by the way. On Friday, the 7th of March, he entered Wittenberg.

The town, the University, the council, were electrified by the news of his arrival. “Luther is come,” said the citizens, as with radiant faces they exchanged salutations with one another in the streets. A tremendous load had been lifted off the minds of all. The vessel of the Reformation was drifting upon the rocks; some waited in terror, others in expectation for the crash, when suddenly the pilot appeared and grasped the helm.

At Worms was the crisis of the Reformer: at Wittenberg was the crisis of the Reformation. Is it demolition, confusion, and ruin only which Protestantism can produce? Is it only wild and unruly passions which it knows to let loose? Or can it build up? Is it able to govern minds, to unite hearts, to extinguish destructive principles, and plant in their stead reorganising and renovating influences? This was to be the next test of the Reformation. The disorganization reigning at Wittenberg was a greater danger than the sword of Charles V. The crisis was a serious one.

On the Sunday morning after his arrival, Luther entered the parish church, and presented himself with calm dignity and quiet self-composure in the old pulpit. Only ten short months had elapsed since he last stood there; but what events had been crowded into that short period! The Diet at Worms: the Wartburg: the funeral of a Pope: the eruption of the Turk: the war between France and Spain; and, last and worst of all, this outbreak at Wittenberg, which threatened ruin to that cause which was the one hope of a world menaced by so many dangers.

Intense excitement, yet deep stillness, reigned in the audience. No element of solemnity was absent. The moment was very critical. The Reformation seemed to hang trembling in the balance. The man was the same, yet chastened, and enriched. Since last he stood before them, he had become invested with a greater interest, for his appearance at Worms had shed a halo not only around himself, but on Germany also: the invisibility in which he had since dwelt, where, though they saw him not, they could hear his voice, had also tended to increase the interest. And now, issuing from his concealment, he stood in person before them, like one of the old prophets who were wont to appear suddenly at critical moments of their nation.

Never had Luther appeared grander, and never was he more truly great. He put a noble restraint upon himself. He who had been as an “iron wall” to the emperor, was tender as a mother to his erring flock. He began by stating, in simple and unpretending style, what he said were the two cardinal doctrines of revelation—the ruin of man, and the redemption in Christ. “He who believes on the Savior,” he remarked, “is freed from sin.”

Thus he returned with them to his first starting-point, salvation by free grace in opposition to salvation by human merit, and in doing so he reminded them of what it was that had emancipated them from the bondage of penances, absolutions, and so many rites enslaving to the conscience, and had brought them into liberty and peace. Coming next to the consideration of the abuse of that liberty into which they were at that moment in some danger of falling, he said faith was not enough, it became them also to have charity. Faith would enable each freely to advance in knowledge, according to the gift of the Spirit and his own capacity; charity would knit them together, and harmonize their individual progress with their corporate unity. He willingly acknowledged the advance they had made in his absence; nay, some of them there were who excelled himself in the knowledge of Divine things; but it was the duty of the strong to bear with the weak. Were there those among them who desired the abolition of the mass, the removal of images, and the instant and entire abrogation of all the old rites? He was with them in principle. He would rejoice if this day there was not one mass in all Christendom, nor an image in any of its churches; and he hoped this state of things would speedily be realised. But there were many who were not able to receive this, who were still edified by these things, and who would be injured by their removal. They must proceed according to order, and have regard to weak brethren. “My friend,” said the preacher, addressing himself to the more advanced, “have you been long enough at the breast? It is well. But permit your brother to drink as long as yourself.”

He strongly insisted that the “Word” which he had preached to them, and which he was about to give them in its written form in their mother tongue, must be their great leader. By the Word, and not the sword, was the Reformation to be propagated. “Were I to employ force,” he said, “what should I gain? Grimace, formality, apings, human ordinances, and hypocrisy,... but sincerity of heart, faith, charity, not at all. Where these three are wanting, all is wanting, and I would not give a pear-stalk for such a result.” With the apostle he failed not to remind his hearers that the weapons of their warfare were not carnal, but spiritual. The Word must be freely preached; and this Word must be left to work in the heart; and when the heart was won, then the man was won, but not till then. The Word of God had created heaven and earth, and all things, and that Word must be the operating power, and “not we poor sinners.” His own history he held to be an example of the power of the Word. He declared God’s Word, preached and wrote against indulgences and Popery, but never used force; but this Word, while he was sleeping, or drinking his tankard of Wittenberg ale with Philip and Amsdorf, worked with so mighty a power, that the Papacy had been weakened and broken to such a degree as no prince or emperor had ever been able to break it. Yet he had done nothing: the Word had done all.

This series of discourses was continued all the week through. All the institutions and ordinances of the Church of Rome, the preacher passed in review, and applied the same principle to them all. After the consideration of the question of the mass, he went on to discuss the subject of images, of monasticism, of the confessional, of forbidden meats, showing that these things were already abrogated in principle, and all that was needed to abolish them in practice, without tumult, and without offense to any one, was just the diffusion of the doctrine which he preached. Every day the great church was crowded, and many flocked from the surrounding towns and villages to these discourses.

The triumph of the Reformer was complete. He had routed the Zwickau fanatics without even naming them. His wisdom, his moderation, his tenderness of heart, and superiority of intellect carried the day, and the new prophets appeared in comparison small indeed. Their “revelations” were exploded, and the Word of God was restored to its supremacy. It was a great battle—greater in some respects than that which Luther had fought at Worms. The whole of Christendom was interested in the result.

At Worms the vessel of Protestantism was in danger of being dashed upon the Scylla of Papal tyranny: at Wittenberg it was in jeopardy of being engulfed in the Charybdis of fanaticism. Luther had guided it past the rocks in the former instance: in the present he preserved it from being swallowed up in the whirlpool.

CHAPTER - POPE ADRIAN AND HIS SCHEME OF REFORM.

Calm Returns — Labors of Luther — Translation of Old Testament — Melanchthon’s Common-places — First Protestant System — Preachers — Books Multiplied — Rapid Diffusion of the Truth — Diet at Nuremberg — Pope Adrian Afraid of the Turk — Still more of Lutheranism — His Exhortation to the Diet — His Reforms put before the Diet — They are Rejected — The Hundred Grievances — Edict of Diet permitting the Gospel to be Preached — Persecution — First Three Martyrs of Lutheran Reformation — Joy of Luther — Death of Pope Adrian.

PICTURE: Door of a Parish Church, Nuremberg PICTURE: Balcony of the Armoury, Nuremberg PICTURE: Part of the City Walls, Nuremberg PICTURE: Wittenberg Student Preaching at Goslar THE storm was quickly succeeded by a calm. All things resumed their wonted course at Wittenberg. The fanatics had shaken the dust from their feet and departed, predicting woe against a place which had forsaken the “revelations” of Nicholas Stork to follow the guidance of the Word of God.

The youth resumed their studies, the citizens returned to their occupations; Luther went in and out of his convent, busied with writing, preaching, and lecturing, besides that which came upon him daily, “the care of all the churches.” One main business that oecupied him, besides the revision of his German New Testament, and the passing of it through the press, was the translation, now undertaken, of the Old Testament. This was a greater work, and some years passed away before it was finished.

When at last, by dint of Herculean labor, it was given to the world, it was found that the idiomatic simplicity and purity of the translation permitted the beauty and splendor of Divine truth to shine through, and its power to be felt. Luther had now the satisfaction of thinking that he had raised an effectual barrier against such fanaticism as that of Zwickau, and had kindled a light which no power on earth would Be able to put out, and which would continue to wax brighter and shine ever wider till it had dispelled the darkness of Christendom.

In 1521 came another work, the Common-places of Melanchthon, which, next after the German translation Of the Bible, contributed powerfully to the establishment of Protestantism. Scattered through a hundred pamphlets and writings were the doctrines of the Reformation—in other words, the recovered truths of Scripture. Melanchthon set about the task of gathering them together, and presenting them in the form of a system. It was the first attempt of the kind. His genius admirably fitted him for this work. He was more of the theologian than Luther, and the grace of his style lent a charm to his theology, and enabled him to find readers among the literary and philosophical classes. The only systems of divinity the world had seen, since the close of the primitive age, were those which the schoolmen had given to it. These had in them neither light nor life; they were dry and hapless, a wilderness of subtle distinctions and doubtful speculations. The system of Melanchthon, drawn from the Bible, exhibiting with rare clearness and beauty the relationships of truth, contrasted strikingly with the dark labyrinth of scholasticism. The Reformation theology was not a chaos of dogmas, as some had begun to suppose it, but a majestic unity.

In proportion as Protestantism strengthened itself at its center, which was Wittenberg, it was diffused more and more widely throughout Germany, and beyond its limits. The movement was breaking out on all sides, to the terror of Rome, and the discomfiture of her subservient princes. The Augustine convents sent numerous recruits to carry on the war. These had been planted, like Papal barracks, all over Germany, but now Rome’s artilllery was turned against herself. This was specially the case in Nuremberg, Osnabruck, Ratisbon, Strasburg, Antwerp, and in Hesse and Wurtemberg. The light shone into the convents of the other orders also, and their inmates, laying down their cowls and frocks at the gates of their monasteries, joined their Brethren and became preachers of the truth. Great was the wrath of Rome when she saw her soldiers turning their arms against her. A multitude of priests became obedient to the faith, and preached it to their flocks. In other cases flocks forsook their priests, finding that they continued to inculcate the old superstitions and perform the old ceremonies. A powerful influence was acting on the minds of men, which carried them onward in the path of the Reformed faith, despite threats and dangers and bitter persecutions. Whole cities renounced the Roman faith and confessed the Gospel. The German Bible and the writings of Luther were read at all hearths and by all classes, while preachers perambulated Germany proclaiming the new doctrines to immense crowds, in the market-place, in burial-grounds, on mountains, and in meadows. At Goslar a Wittenberg student preached in a meadow planted with limetrees, which procured for his hearers the designation of the “Lime-tree Brethren.”

The world’s winter seemed passing rapidly away. Everywhere the ice was breaking up; the skies were filling with light; and its radiance was refreshing to the eyes and to the souls of men! The German nation, emerging from torpor and ignorance, stood up, quickened with a new life, and endowed with a marvellous power. A wondrous and sudden enlightenment had overspread it. It was astonishing to see how the tastes of the people were refined, their perceptions deepened, and their judgments strengthened. Artisans, soldiers—nay, even women—with the Bible in their hand, would put to flight a whole phalanx of priests and doctors who strove to do battle for Rome, but who knew only to wield the old weapons. The printing-press, like a battering-ram of tremendous force, thundered night and day against the walls of the old fortress. “The impulse which the Reformation gave to popular literature in Germany,” says D’Aubigne, “was immense. Whilst in the year 1513 only thirty-five publications had appeared, and thirty-seven in 1517, the number of books increased with astonishing rapidity after the appearance of Luther’s ‘Theses.’ In 1518, we find seventy-one different works; in 1519, one hundred and eleven; in 1520, two hundred and eight; in 1521, two hundred and eleven; in 1522, three hundred and forty-seven; and in 1523, four hundred and ninety-eight. These publications were nearly all on the Protestant side, and were published at Wittenberg. In the last-named year (1523) only twenty Roman Catholic publications appeared.” 1 It was Protestantism that called the literature of Germany into existence.

An army of book-hawkers was extemporised. These men seconded the efforts of publishers in the spread of Luther’s writings, which, clear and terse, glowing with the fire of enthusiasm, and rich with the gold of truth, brought with them an invigoration of the intellect as well as a renewal of the heart. They were translated into French, English, Italian, and Spanish, and circulated in all these countries. Occupying a middle point between the first and second cradles of the Reformation, the Wittenberg movement covered the space between, touching the Hussites of Bohemia on the one side, and the Lollards of England on the other.

We must now turn our eyes on those political events which were marching alongside of the Protestant movement. The Diet of Regency which the emperor had appointed to administer affairs during his absence in Spain was now sitting at Nuremberg. The main business which had brought it together was the inroads of the Turk. The progress of Soliman’s arms was fitted to strike the European nations with terror. Rhodes had been captured; Belgrad had fallen; and the victorious leader threatened to make good his devastating march into the very heart of Hungary. Louis, the king of that country, sent his ambassador to the Diet to entreat help against the Asiatic conqueror. At the Diet appeared, too, Chieregato, the nuncio of the Pope.

Adrian VI., when he cast his eyes on the Tartar hordes on the eastern frontier, was not without fears for Rome and Italy; but he was still more alarmed when he turned to Germany, and contmplated: the appalling spread of Lutheranism. 2 Accordingly, he instructed his ambassador to demand two things—first, that the Diet should concert measures for stopping the progress of the Sultan of Constantinople; but, whatever they might do in this affair, he emphatically demanded that they should cut short the career of the monk of Wittenberg.

In the brief which, on the 25th of November, 1522, Adrian addressed to the “Estates of the sacred Roman Empire, assembled at Nuremberg,” he urged his latter and more important request, “to cut down this pestilential plant that was spreading its boughs so widely... to remove this gangrened member from the body,” by reminding them that “the omnipotent God had caused the earth to open and swallow up alive the two schismatics, Dathan and Abiram; that Peter, the prince of apostles, had struck Ananias and Sapphira with sudden death for lying against God... that their own ancestors had put John Huss and Jerome of Prague to death, who now seemed risen from the dead in Martin Luther.” 3 But the Papal nuncio, on entering Germany, found that this document, dictated in the hot air of Italy, did not suit the cooler latitude of Bavaria.

As Chieregato passed along the highway on his mule, and raised his two fingers, after the usual manner, to bless the wayfarer, the populace would mimic his action by raising theirs, to show how little they cared either for himself or his benediction. This was very mortifying, but still greater mortifications awaited him. When he arrived at Nuremberg, he found, to his dismay, the pulpits occupied by Protestant preachers, and the cathedrals crowded with most attentive audiences. When he complained of this, and demanded the suppression of the sermons, the Diet replied that Nuremberg was a free city, and that the magistrates mostly were Lutheran.

He next intimated his intention of apprehending the preachers by his own authority, in the Pontiff’s name; but the Archbishop of Mainz, and others, in consternation at the idea of a popular tumult, warned the nuncio against a project so fraught with danger, and told him that if he attempted such a thing, they would quit the city without a moment’s delay, and leave him to deal with the indignant burghers as best he could.

Baffled in these attempts, and not a little mortified that his own office and his master’s power should meet with so little reverence in Germany, the nuncio began, but in less arrogant tone, to unfold to the Diet the other instructions of the Pope; and more especially to put before its members the promised reforms which Adrian had projected when elevated to the Popedom. The Popes have often pursued a similar line of conduct when they really meant nothing; but Adrian was sincere. To convince the Diet that he was so, he made a very ample confession of the need of a reform. “We know,” so ran the instructions put into the hands of his nuncio on setting out for the Diet, “that for a considerable time many abominable things have found a place beside the Holy Chair — abuses in spiritual things—exorbitant straining at prerogatives—evil everywhere. From the head the malady has proceeded to the limbs; from the Pope it has extended to the prelates; we are all gone astray, there is none that hath done rightly, no, not one.” At the hearing of these words the champions of the Papacy hung their heads; its opponents held up theirs. “We need hesitate no longer,” said the Lutheran princes of the Diet; “it is is not Luther only, but the Pope, that denounces the corruptions of the Church: reform is the order of the day, not merely at Wittenberg, but at Rome also.”

There was all the while an essential difference between these two men, and their reforms: Adrian would have lopped off a few of the more rotten of the branches; Luther was for uprooting the evil tree, and planting a good one in its stead. This was a reform little to the taste of Adrian, and so, before beginning his own reform, he demanded that Luther’s should be put down. It was needful, Adrian doubtless thought, to apply the pruningknife to the vine of the Church, but still more needful was it to apply the axe to the tree of Lutheranism. For those who would push reform with too great haste, and to too great a length, he had nothing but the stake, and accordingly he called on the Diet to execute the imperial edict of death upon Luther, whose heresy he described as having the same infernal origin, as disgraced by the same abominable acts, and tending to the same tremendous issue, as that of Mahomet. 5 As regarded the reform which he himself meditated, he took care to say that he would guard against the two evils mentioned above; he would neither be too extreme nor too precipitate; “he must proceed gently, and by degrees,” step by step— which Luther, who translated the brief of Adrian into German, with marginal notes, interpreted to mean, a few centuries between each step? The Pope had communicated to the Diet, somewhat vaguely, his projected measure of reformation, and the Diet felt the more justified in favoring Adrian with their own ideas of what that measure ought to be. First of all they told Adrian that to think of executing the Edict of Worms against Luther would be madness. To put the Reformer to death for denouncing the abuses Adrian himself had acknowledged, would not be more unjust than it would be dangerous. It would be sure to provoke all insurrection that would deluge Germany with blood. Luther must be refuted from Scripture, for his writings were in the hands and his opinions were in the hearts of many of the population. They knew of but one way of settling the controversy—a General Council, namely; and they demanded that such a Council should be summoned, to meet in some neutral German town, within the year, and that the laity as well as the clergy should have a seat and voice in it. To this not very palatable request the princes appended another still more unpalatable—the “Hundred Grievances,” as it was termed, and which was a terrible catalogue of the exactions, frauds, oppressions, and wrongs that Germany had endured at the hands of the Popes, and which it had long silently groaned under, but the redress of which the Diet now demanded, with certification that if within a reasonable time a remedy was not forthcoming, the princes would take the matter into their own hands. The Papal nuncio had seen and heard sufficient to convince him that he had stayed long enough at Nuremberg. He hastily quitted the city, leaving it to some other to be the bearer of this ungracious message to the Pontiff.

Till the Diet should arrange its affairs with the Pontiff, it resolved that the Gospel should continue to be preached. What a triumph for Protestantism!

But a year before, at Worms, the German princes had concurred with Charles V. in the edict of death passed on Luther. Now, not only do they refuse to execute that edict, but they decree that the pure Gospel shall be preached. 8 This indicates rapid progress. Luther hailed it as a triumph, and the echoes of his shout came back from the Swiss hills in the joy it awakened among the Reformers ofHelvetia.

In due course the recess, or decree, of the Diet of Nuremberg reached the Seven-hilled City, and was handed in at the Vatican. The meek Adrian was beside himself with rage. Luther was not to be burned! a General Council was demanded! a hundred grievances, all duly catalogued, must be redressed! and there was, moreover, a quiet hint that if the Pope did not look to this matter in time, others would attend to it. Adrian sat down, and poured out a torrent of invectives and threatenings, than which nothing more fierce and bitter had ever emanated from the Vatican. 9 Frederick of Saxony, against whom this fulmination was thundered, put his hand upon his sword’s hilt when he read it. “No,” said Luther, the only one of the three who was able to command his temper, “we must have no war. No one shall fight for the Gospel.” Peace was preserved.

The rage of the Papal party was embittered by the checks it was meeting with. War had been averted, but persecution broke out. At every step the Reformation gathered new glory. The courage of the Reformer and the learning of the scholar had already illustrated it, but now it was to be glorified by the devotion of the martyr. It was not in Wittenberg that the first stake was planted. Charles V. would have dragged Luther to the pile, nay, he would have burned the entire Wittenberg school in one fire, had he had the power; but he could act in Germany only so far as the princes went with him. It was otherwise in his hereditary dominions of the Low Countries; there he could do as he pleased; and there it was that the storm, after muttering awhile, at last burst out. At Antwerp the Gospel had found entrance into the Augustine convent, and the inmates not only embraced the truth, but in some instances began to preach it with power. This drew upon the convent the eyes of the inquisitors who had been sent into Flanders. The friars were apprehended, imprisoned, and condemned to death. One recanted; others managed to escape; but three—Henry Voes, John Esch, and Lambert Thorn—braved the fire. They were carried in chains to Brussels, and burned in the great square of that city on the 1st of July, 1523. 10 They behaved nobly at the stake. While the multitude around them were weeping, they sang songs of joy. Though about to undergo a terrible death, no sorrow darkened their faces; their looks, on the contrary, bespoke the gladness and triumph of their spirits. Even the inquisitors were deeply moved, and waited long before applying the torch, in the hope of prevailing with the youths to retract and save their lives. Their entrearies could extort no answer but this—“We will die for the name of Jesus Christ.” At length the pile was kindled, and even amid the flames the psalm ascended from their lips, and joy continued to light up their countenances. So died the first martyrs of the Reformation—illustrious heralds of those hundreds of thousands who were to follow them by the same dreadful road—not dreadful to those who walk by faith—to the everlasting mansion of the sky. Three confessors of the Gospel had the stake consumed; in their place it had created hundreds. “Wherever the smoke of their burning blew,” sale!

Erasmus, “it bore with it the seeds of heretics.” Luther heard of their death with thanksgiving. A cause which had produced martyrs bore the seal of Divine authentication, and was sure of victory.

Adrian of Rome, too, lived to hear of the death of these youths. The persecutions had begun, but Adrian’s reforms had not yet commenced.

The world had seen the last of these reforms in the lurid light that streamed from the stake in the great square of Brussels. Adrian died on the 14th of September of the same year, and the estimation in which the Romans held him may be gathered from the fact that, during the night which succeeded the day on which he breathed his last, they adorned the house of his physician with garlands, and wrote over its portals this inscription — “To the savior of his country.”

CHAPTER - POPE CLEMENT AND THE NUREMBERG DIET.

The New Pope — Policy of Clement — Second Diet at Nuremberg — Campeggio — His instructions to the Diet — The “Hundred Grievances” — Rome’s Policy of Dissimulation — Surprise of the Princes — They are Asked to Execute the Edict of Worms — Device of the Princes — A General Council — Vain Hopes — The Harbor — Still at Sea — Protestant Preaching in Nuremberg — Proposal to hold a Diet at Spires — Disgust of the Legate — Alarm of the Vatican — Both Sides Prepare for the Spires Diet.

PICTURE: The Papal Nuncio Chieregato in Nuremberg PICTURE: Gala-day in Nuremberg (time, Sixteenth Century) ADRIAN was dead. His scheme for the reform of the Papacy, with all the hopes and fears it had excited, descended with him to the grave. Cardinal Guilio de Medici, an unsuccessful candidate at the last election, had better fortune this time, and now mounted the Pontifical throne. The new Pope, who took the title of Clement VII., made haste to reverse the policy of his predecessor. Pallavicino was of opinion that the greatest evils and dangers of the Papacy had arisen from the choice of a “saint” to fill the Papal chair.

Clement VII. took care to let the world know that its present occupant was a “man of affairs”—no austere man, with neither singing nor dancing in his palace; no senile dreamer of reforms; but one who knew both to please the Romans and to manage foreign courts. “But it is in the storm that the pilot proves his skill,” says Ranke. 1 Perilous times had come. The great winds had begun to blow, and the nations were laboring, as the ocean heaves before a tempest. Two powerful kings were fighting in Italy; the Turk was brandishing his scimitar on the Austrian frontier; but the quarter of the sky that gave Clement VII. the greatest concern was Wittenberg.

There a storm was brewing which would try his seamanship to the utmost.

Leo X. had trifled with this affair. Adrian VI. had imagined that he had only to utter the magic word “reform,” and the billows would subside and the winds sink to rest. Clement would prove himself an abler pilot; he would act as a statesman, as a Pope.

Early in the spring of 1524, the city of Nuremberg was honored a second time with the presence of the Imperial Diet within its walls. The Pope’s first care was to send a right man as legate to this assembly. He selected Cardinal Campeggio, a man of known ability, of great experience, and of weight of character — the fittest, in short, his court could furnish. His journey to the Italian frontier was like a triumphal march. But when he entered upon German soil all these tokens of public enthusiasm forsook him, and when he arrived at the gates of Nuremberg he looked in vain for the usual procession of magistrates and clergy, marshalled under cross and banner, to bid him welcome. Alas! how the times had changed! The proud ambassador of Clement passed quietly through the streets, and entered his hotel, as if he had been an ordinary traveller. The instructions Campeggio had received from his master directed him to soothe the Elector Frederick, who was still smarting from Adrian’s furious letter; and to withhold no promise and neglect no art which might prevail with the Diet, and make it subservient. This done, he was to strike at Luther. If they only had the monk at the stake, all would be well.

The able and astute envoy of Clement acted his part well. He touched modestly on his devotion to Germany, which had induced him to accept this painful mission when all others had declined it. He described the tender solicitude and sleepless care of his master, the Pope, whom he likened now to a pilot, sitting aloft, and watching anxiously, while all on board slept; and now to a shepherd, driving away the wolf, and leading his flock into good pastures. He could not refrain from expressing “his wonder that so many great and honorable princes should suffer the religion, rites, and ceremonies wherein they were born and bred, and in which their fathers and progenitors had died, to be abolished and trampled upon.” He begged them to think where all this would end, namely, in a universal uprising of peoples against their rulers, and the destruction of Germany.

As for the Turk, it was unnecessary for him to say much. The mischief he threatened Christendom with was plain to all men. The princes heard him with respect, and thanked him for his good will and his friendly counsels; but to come to the matter in hand, the German nation, said they, sent a list of grievances in writing to Rome; they would like to know ff the Pope had returned any answer, and what it was.

Campeggio, though he assumed an air of surprise, had expected this interrogatory to be put to him, and was not unprepared for the part he was to act. “As to their demands,” he said, “there had been only three copies of them brought privately to Rome, whereof one had fallen into his hands; but the Pope and college of cardinals could not believe that they had been framed by the princes; they thought that some private persons had published them in hatred to the court of Rome; and thus he had no instructions as to that particular.” The surprise the legate’s answer gave the Diet, and the indignation it kindled among its members, may be imagined.

The Emperor Charles, whom the war with Francis kept in Spain, had sent his ambassador, John Hunnaart, to the Diet to complain that the decree of Worms, which had been enacted with their unanimous consent, was not observed, and to demand that it be put in execution — in other words, that Luther be put to death, and that the Gospel be proscribed in all the States of the Empire. 5 Campeggio had made the same request in his master’s name. “Impossible!” cried many of the deputies; “to attempt such a thing would be to plunge Germany into war and bloodshed.”

Campeggio and Hunnaart insisted, nevertheless, that the princes should put in force the edict against Luther and his doctrines, to which they had been consenting parties. What was the Diet to do?

It could not repeal the edict, and it dared not enforce it, The princes hit upon a clever device for silencing the Pope who was pushing them on, and appeasing the people who were holding them back. They passed a decree saying that the Edict of Worms should be vigorously enforced, as far as possible. 6 (Edipus himself could hardly have said what this meant.

Practically it was the repeal of the edict; for the majority of the States had declared that to enforce it was not possible.

Campeggio and Hunnaart, the Spanish envoy from Charles, V., had gained what was a seeming victory, but a real defeat. Other defeats awaited them.

Having dexterously muzzled the emperor’s ban, the next demand of the Nuremberg Diet was for a General Council. There was a traditional belief in the omnipotency of this expedient to correct all abuses and end all controversies. When the sky began to lower, and a storm appeared about to sweep over Christendom, men turned their eyes to a Council, as to a harbor of refuge: once within it, the laboring vessel would be at rest — tossed no longer upon the billows. The experiment had been tried again and again, and always with the same result, and that result failure — signal failure. In the recent past were the two Councils of Constance and Basle.

These had ended, like all that preceded them, in disappointment. Much had been looked for from them, but nothing had been realised. They appeared in the retrospect like goodly twin trees, laden with leaves and blossoms, but they brought no fruit to perfection. With regard to Constance, if it had humiliated three Popes, it had exalted a fourth, and he the haughtiest of them all; and as for Reformation, had not the Council devoted its whole time and power to devising measures for the extinction of that reforming spirit which alone could have remedied the evils complained of? There was one man there worth a hundred Councils: how had they dealt with him? They had dragged him to the stake, and all the while he was burning, cursed him as a heretic! And what was the consequence? Why, that the stream of corruption, dammed up for a moment, had broken out afresh, and was now flowing with torrent deeper, broader, and more irresistible than ever. But the majority of the princes convened at Nuremberg were unable to think of other remedy, and so, once again, the old demand was urged—a General Council, to be held on German soil.

However, the princes will concert measures in order that this time the Council shall not be abortive; now at last, it will give the world a Pope who shall be a true father to Christendom, together with a pious, faithful, and learned hierarchy, and holy and laborious priests—in short, the “golden age,” so long waited for. The princes will summon a Diet—a national and lay Diet—to meet at Spires, in November of this year. And, further, they will take steps to evoke the real sentiments of Germany on the religious question, and permit the wishes of its several cities and States to be expressed in the Diet; and, in this way, a Reformation will be accomplished such as Germany wishes. The princes believed that they were ending their long and dangerous navigation, and were at last in sight of the harbor.

So had they often thought before, but they had awakened to find that they were still at sea, with the tempest lowering overhead, and the white reefs gleaming pale through the waters below. They were destine to repeat this experience once more. The very idea of such a Diet as was projected was an insult to the Papacy. For a secular assembly to meet and discuss religious questions, and settle ecclesiastical reforms, was to do a great deal more than paving the way for a General Council; it was to assume its powers and exercise its functions; it was to be that Council itself—nay, it was to go further still, it was to seat itself in the chair of the Pontiff, to whom alone belonged the decision in all matters of faith. It was to pluck the scepter from the hands of the man who held himself divinely invested with the government of the Church.

The Papal legate and the envoy of Charles V. offered a stout resistance to the proposed resolution of the princes. They represented to them what an affront that resolve would be to the Papal chair, what an attack upon the prerogatives of the Pontiff. The princes, however, were not to be turned from their purpose. They decreed that a Diet should assemble at Spires, in November, and that meanwhile the States and free towns of Germany should express their mind as regarded the abuses to be corrected and the reforms to be instituted, so that, when the Council met, the Diet might be able to speak in the name of the Fatherland, and demand such Reformation of the Church as the nation wished.

Meanwhile the Protestant preachers redoubled their zeal; morning and night they proclaimed the Gospel in the churches. The two great cathedrals of Nuremberg were filled to overflowing with an attentive audience. The Lord’s Supper was dispensed according to the apostolic mode, and 4,000 persons, including the emperor’s sister, the Queen of Denmark, and others of rank, joined in the celebration of the ordinance. The mass was forsaken; the images were turned out of doors; the Scriptures were explained according to the early Fathers; and scarce could the Papal legate go or return from the imperial hall, where the Diet held its meetings, without being jostled in the street by the crowds hurrying to the Protestant sermon. The tolling of the bells for worship, the psalm pealed forth by thousands of voices, and wafted across the valley of the Pegnitz to the imperial chateau on the opposite height, sorely tried the equanimity of the servants of the Pope and the emperor. Campeggio saw Nuremberg plunging every day deeper into heresy; he saw the authority of his master set at nought, and the excommunicated doctrines every hour enlisting new adherents, who feared neither the ecclesiastical anathema nor the imperial ban. He saw all this with indignation and disgust, and yet he was entirely without power to prevent it.

Germany seemed nearer than it had been at any previous moment to a national Reformation. It promised to reach the goal by a single bound. A few months, and the Alps will do more than divide between two countries; they will divide between two Churches. No longer will the bulls and palls of the Pope cross their snows, and no longer will the gold of Germany flow back to swell the wealth and maintain the pride of the city whence they come. The Germans will find for themselves a Church and a creed, without asking humbly the permission of the Italians. They will choose their own pastors, and exercise their own government; and leave the Shepherd of the Tiber to care for his flock on the south of the mountains, without stretching his crosier to the north of them. This was the import of what the Diet had agreed to do.

We do not wonder that Campeggio and Hunnaart viewed the resolution of the princes with dismay. In truth, the envoy of the emperor had about as much cause to be alarmed as the nuncio of the Pope. Charles’s authority in Germany was tottering as well as Clement’s; for if the States should break away from the Roman faith, the emperor’s sway would be weakened—in fact, all but annihilated; the imperial dignity would be shorn of its splendor; and those great schemes, in the execution of which the emperor had counted confidently on the aid of the Germans, would have to be abandoned as impracticable.

But it was in the Vatican that the resolution of the princes excited the greatest terror and rage. Clement comprehended at a glance the full extent of the disaster that threatened his throne. All Germany was becoming Lutheran; the half of his kingdom was about to be torn from him. Not a stone must be left unturned, not an art known in the Vatican must be neglected, if by any means the meeting of the Diet at Spires may be prevented.

To Spires all eyes are now turned, where the fate of the Popedom is to be decided. On both sides there is the bustle of anxious preparation. The princes invite the cities and States to speak boldly out, and declare their grievances, and say what reforms they wish to have enacted. In the opposite camp there is, if possible, still greater activity and preparation.

The Pope is sounding an alarm, and exhorting his friends, in prospect of this emergency, to unite their counsels and their arms. While both sides are busy preparing for the eventful day, we shall pause, and turn our attention to the city where the Diet just breaking up had held its sitting.

CHAPTER - NUREMBERG. (THIS CHAPTER IS FOUNDED ON NOTES MADE ON THE SPOT BY THE AUTHOR IN 1871.)

Three Hundred Years Since — Site of Nuremberg — Depot of Commerce in Middle Ages — Its Population — Its Patricians and Plebeians — Their Artistic Skill — Nuremberg a Free Town — Its Burgraves — Its Oligarchy — Its Subject Towns — Fame of its Arts — Albert Durer — Hans Sachs — Its Architecture and Marvels — Enchantment of the Place — Rath-Haus — State Dungeons — Implements of Torture.

PICTURE: The River Pegnitz, intersecting the City of Nuremberg PICTURE: St. Sebalds Church, Nuremberg NUREMBERG three hundred years ago was one of the more famous of the cities of Europe. It invites our study as a specimen of those few fortunate communities which, preserving a feeble intelligence in times of almost universal ignorance and barbarism, and enjoying a measure of independence in an age when freedom was all but unknown, were able, as the result of the exceptional position they occupied, to render services of no mean value to the civilization and religion of the world.

The distinction and opulence which Nuremberg enjoyed, in the fifteenth century and onward to the time of the Reformation, it owed to a variety of causes. Its salubrious air; the sweep of its vast plains, on all sides touching the horizon, with a single chain of purple hills to redeem the landscape from monotony; and the facilities for hunting and other exercises which it afforded, made it a pleasant residence, and often drew thither the emperor and his court. With the court came, of course, other visitors. The presence of the emperor in Nuremberg helped to assemble men of genius and culture within its walls, and invested it, moreover, with no little political importance.

Nuremberg owed more to another cause, namely, its singularly central position. Being set down on one of the world’s greatest highways, it formed the center of a network of commercial routes, which ramified over a large part of the globe, and embraced the two hemispheres.

Situated on the great Franconian plain—a plain which was the Mesopotamia of the West, seeing that, like the Oriental Mesopotamia, it lay between two great rivers, the Danube and the Rhine—Nuremberg became one of the great emporiums of the commerce carried on between Asia and Europe. In those ages, when roads were far from common, and railways did not exist at all, rivers were the main channels of communication between nation and nation, and the principal means by which they effected an interchange of their commodities. The products of Asia and the Levant entered the mouths of the Danube by the Black Sea, and, ascending that stream into Germany, they were carried across the plain to Nuremberg. From Nuremberg this merchandise was sent on its way to the Rhine, and, by the numerous outlets of that river, diffused among the nations of the northwest of Europe. The commerce of the Adriatic reached Nuremberg by another route which crossed the Tyrol.

Thus many converging lines found here their common meeting-place, and from hence radiated over the West. Founded in the beginning of the tenth century, the seat of the first Diet of the Empire, the meeting-place moreover of numerous nationalities, the depot of a vast and enriching commerce, and inhabited by a singularly quick and inventive population, Nuremberg rose steadily in size and importance. The fifteenth century saw it a hive of industry, a cradle of art, and a school of letters.

In the times we speak of, Nuremberg had a population of 70,000. This, in our day, would not suffice to place a city in the first rank; but it was different then, when towns of only 30,000 were accounted populous.

Frankfort-on-the-Main could not boast of more than half the population of Nuremberg. But though large for its day, the number of its population contributed but little to the city’s eminence. Its renown rested on higher grounds—on the enterprise, the genius, and the wealth of its inhabitants.

Its citizens were divided into two classes, the patrician and the plebeian.

The line that separated the two orders was immovable. No amount of wealth or of worth could lift up the plebeian into the patrician rank. In the same social grade in which the cradle of the citizen had been placed must the evening of life find him. The patricians held their patents of nobility from the emperor, a circumstance of which they were not a little proud, as attesting the descent of their families from very ancient times. They inhabited fine mansions, and expended the revenues of their estates in a princely splendor and a lavish hospitality, delighting greatly in fetes and tournaments, but not unmindful the while of the claims to patronage which the arts around them possessed, and the splendors of which invested their city with so great a halo.

The plebeians were mostly craftsmen, but craftstmen of exceeding skill.

No artificers in all Europe could compete with them. Since the great sculptors of Greece, there had arisen no race of artists which could wield the chisel like the men of Nuremberg. Not so bold perhaps as their Greek predecessors, their invention was as prolific and their touch as exquisite.

They excelled in all manner of cunning workmanship in marble and bronze, in metal and ivory, in stone and wood. Their city of Nuremberg they filled with their creations, which strangers from afar came to gaze upon and admire. The fame of its artists was spread throughout Europe, and scarce was there a town of any note in any kingdom in which the “Nuremberg hand” was not to be seen unmistakably certified in some embodiment of quaintness, or of beauty, or of utility. A more precious possession still than either its exquisite genius or its unrivalled art did Nuremberg boast: liberty, namely—liberty, lacking which genius droops, and the right hand forgets its cunning. Nuremberg was one of the free cities of Germany. In those days there were not fewer than ninety-three such towns in the Empire. They were green oases in the all but boundless desert of oppression and misery which the Europe of those days presented. They owed their rise in part to war, but mainly to commerce. When the emperors on occasion found themselves hard pushed, in the long war which they waged with the Popes, when their soldiers were becoming few and their exchequer empty, they applied to the towns to furnish them with the means of renewing the contest. They offered them charters of freedom on condition of their raising so many men-at-arms, or paying over a certain sum to enable them to continue their campaigns. The bargain was a welcome one on both sides. Many of these towns had to buy their enfranchisement with a great sum, but a little liberty is worth a great deal of gold. Thus it was on the red fields of the period that their freedom put forth its earliest blossoms; and it was amid the din of arms that the arts of peace grew up.

But commerce did more than war to call into existence such towns as Nuremberg. With the prosecution of foreign trade came wealth, and with wealth came independence and intelligence. Men began to have a glimpse of higher powers than those of brute force, and of wider rights than any included within the narrow circle of feudalism. They bought with their money, or they wrested by their power, charters of freedom from their sovereigns, or their feudal barons. They constituted themselves into independent and self-governed bodies. They were, in fact, republics on a small scale, in the heart of great monarchies. Within the walls of their cities slavery was abolished, laws were administered, and rights were enjoyed.

Such towns began to multiply as it drew towards the era of the Reformation, not in Germany only, but in France, in Italy, and in the Low Countries, and they were among the first to welcome the approach of that great moral and social renovation.

Nuremberg, which held so conspicuous a place in this galaxy of free towns, was first of all governed by a Burgrave, or Stadtholder. It is a curious fact that the royal house of Prussia make their first appearance in history as the Burgraves of Nuremberg. That office they held till about the year 1414, when Frederick IV. sold his right, together with his castle, to the Nurembergers, and with the sum thus obtained purchased the Marquisate of Brandenburg. This was the second stage in the advance of that house to the pinnacle of political greatness to which it long afterwards attained.

When the reign of the burgrave came to an end, a republic, or rather oligarchy, next succeeded as the form of government in Nuremberg. First of all was a Council of Three Hundred, which had the power of imposing taxes and contributions, and of deciding on the weighty question of peace and war. The Council of Three Hundred annually elected a smaller body, consisting of only thirty members, by whom the ordinary government of the city was administered. The Great Council was composed of patricians, with a sprinkling of the more opulent of the merchants and artificers. The Council of Thirty was composed of patricians only.

Further, Nuremberg had a considerable territory around it, of which it was the capital, and which was amply studded with towns. Outside its walls was a circuit of some hundred miles, in which were seven cities, and boroughs and villages, of all of which Nuremberg was mistress. When we take into account the fertility of the land, and the extensiveness of the trade that enriched the region, and in which all these towns shared, we see in Nuremberg and its dependencies a principality far from contemptible in either men or resources. “The kingdom of Bohemia,” says Gibbon, “was less opulent than the adjacent city of Nuremberg.” 2 Lying in the center of Southern Germany, the surrounding States in defending themselves were defending Nuremberg, and thus it could give its undivided attention to the cultivation of those arts in which it so greatly excelled, when its less happily situated neighbors were wasting their treasure and pouring out their blood on the battle-field.

The “Golden Bull,” in distributing the imperial honors among the more famous of the German cities, did not overlook this one. If it assigned to Frankfort the distinction of being the place of the emperor’s “election,” and if it yielded to Augsburg the honor of seeing him crowned, it required that the emperor should hold his first court in Nuremberg. The castle of the mediaeval emperors is still to be seen. It crowns the height which rises on the northern bank of the Pegnitz, immediately within the city-gate, on the right, as one enters from the north, and from this eminence it overlooks the town which lies at its feet, thickly planted along the stream that divides it into two equal halves. The builder of the royal chateau obviously was compelled to follow, not the rules of architecture, but the angles and irregularities of the rock on which he placed the castle, which is a strong, uncouth, unshapely fabric, forming a striking contrast to the many graceful edifices in the city on which it looks down.

In this city was the Diet at this time assembled. It was the seat (938) of the first Diet of the Empire, and since that day how often had the grandees, the mailed chivalry, and the spiritual princedoms of Germany gathered within its walls! One can imagine how gay Nuremberg was on these occasions, when the banner of the emperor floated on its castle, and warders were going their rounds on its walls, and sentinels were posted in its flanking towers, and a crowd of lordly and knightly company, together with a good deal that was neither lordly nor knightly, were thronging its streets, and peering curiously into its studios and workshops, and ransacking its marts and warehouses, stocked with the precious products of far-distant climes. Nor would the Nurembergers be slow to display to the eyes of their visitors the marvels of their art and the products of their enterprise, in both of which they were at that time unequalled on this side of the Alps. Nuremberg was, in its way, on these occasions an international exhibition, and not without advantage to both exhibitor and visitor, stimulating, as no doubt it did, the trade of the one, and refining the taste of the other. The men who gathered at these times to Nuremberg were but too accustomed to attach glory to nothing save tournaments and battle-fields; but the sight of this city, so rich in achievements of another kind, would help to open their eyes, and show them that there was a more excellent way to fame, and that the chisel could win triumphs which, if less bloody than those of the sword, were far more beneficial to mankind, and gave to their authors a renown that was far purer and more lasting than that of arms.

Now it was the turn of the Nurembergers themselves to wonder. The Gospel had entered their gates, and many welcomed it as a “pearl” more to be esteemed than the richest jewel or the finest fabric that India or Asia had ever sent to their markets. It was to listen to the new wonders now for the first time brought to their knowledge, that the citizens of Nuremberg were day by day crowding the Church of St. Sebaldus and the Cathedral of St. Lawrence. Among these multitudes, now hanging on the lips of Osiander and other preachers, was Albert Durer, the great painter, sculptor, and mathematician. This man of genius embraced the faith of Protestantism, and became a friend of Luther. His house is still shown, near the old imperial castle, hard by the northern gate of the city. Of his great works, only a few remain in Nuremberg; they have mostly gone to enrich other cities, that were rich enough to buy what Albert Durer’s native town was not wealthy enough in these latter times to retain.

In Nuremberg, too, lived Hans Sachs, the poet, also a disciple of the Gospel and a friend of Luther. The history of Sachs is a most romantic one. He was the son of a tailor in Nuremberg, and was born in 1494, and named Hans after his father. Hans adopted the profession of a shoemaker, and the house in which he worked still exists, and is situated in the same quarter of the town as that of Albert Durer. But the workshop of Hans Sachs could not hold his genius. Quitting his stall one day, he sallied forth bent on seeing the world. He passed some time in the brilliant train of the Emperor Maximilian. He returned to Nuremberg and married. The Reformation breaking forth, his mind opened to the glow of the truth, and then it was that his poetic imagination, invigorated and sanctified, burst out in holy song, which resounded through Germany, and helped to prepare the minds of men for the mighty revolution that was going forward. “The spiritual songs of Hans Sachs,” says D’Aubigne, “and his Bible in verse, were a powerful help to this great work.

It would perhaps be hard to decide who did the most for it—the Prince- Elector of Saxony, administrator of the Empire, or the Nuremberg shoemaker!”

Here, too, and about the same period, lived Peter Vischer, the sculptor and caster in bronze; Adam Craft, the sculptor, whose “seven pillars” are still to be seen in the Church of; St. Claire; Veit Stoss, the carver in wood; and many besides, quick of eye and cunning of hand, whose names have perished, now live in their works alone, which not only served as models to the men of their own age, but have stimulated the ingenuity and improved the taste of many in ours.

On another ground Nuremberg is worth our study. It is perhaps the bestpreserved mediaeval town north of the Alps. To visit it, then, though only in the page of the describer, is to see the very scenes amid which some of the great events of the Reformation were transacted, and the very streets on which their actors walked and the houses in which they lived. In Spain there remain to this day cities of an age still more remote, and an architecture still more curious. There is Toledo, whose seven-hilled site, washed by the furious torrent of the Tagus, lifts high in the air, and sets in bold relief against the sky, its many beautiful structures—its lovely Alcazar, its cathedral roofs, its ruined synagogues, its Moorish castles— the whole looking more like the creation of a magician than the work of the mason. There is Cordova, with its wonderful mosque, fashioned out of the spolia opima of Africa and the Levant, and spread around this unique temple is perhaps the greatest labyrinth of narrow and winding lanes that anywhere exists. There is Granada, whose streets and fountains and gardens are still redolent of the Moor, and which borrows a further glory from the two magnificent objects by which it is overhung — the one of art, the Alhambra,whose unique and dazzling beauty it has defied the spoiler to destroy; and the other of nature, the Sierra Nevada, which towers aloft in snowy grandeur, and greets its brother Atlas across the Straits. And, not to multiply instances, there is Malaga, a relic of a still more ancient time than the Moorish age, showing us how the Phoenicians built, and what sort of cities were upon the earth when civilization was confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, and the mariner had not yet ventured to steer his bark beyond “Pillars of Hercules.”

But there is no city in Northern Europe—no relic of the architecture of the Germanic nations, when that architecture was in its prime, or had but recently begun to decline, at all to be compared with Nuremberg. As it was when the emperor trod its streets, and the magnificence of Germany was gathered into it, and the flourish of trumpets and the roll of drums blended with the peaceful din of its chisels and hammers, so is it now. The same portals with their rich carvings; the same windows with their deep mullions; the same fountains with their curious emblematic devices and groups, in bronze or in stone; the same peaked and picturesque gables; the same lofty roofs, running up into the sky and presenting successive rows of attic windows, their fronts all richly embellished and hung with draperies of wreathed work, wrought in stone by the hands of cunning men—in short, the same assemblage of curious, droll, beautiful, and majestic objects which were before the eyes of the men who have been four centuries in their grave, meet the eye of the traveler at this day.

In the middle of the city is the depression or valley through which the stream of the Pegnitz flows. There the buildings cluster thickly together, forming a perfect labyrinth of winding lanes, with no end of bridges and canals, and while their peaked roofs tower into the air their bases dip into the water. The rest of the city lies on the two slopes that run up from the Pegnitz, on either bank, forming thus two divisions which look at each other across the intervening valley. In this part of Nuremberg the streets are spacious, the houses of stone, large and massy, and retaining the remarkable feature we have already mentioned—exceedingly lofty roofs; for in some instances six storeys of upright mason-work are surmounted by other six storeys of slanting roof, with their complement of attic windows, suggesting the idea of a house upon a house, or of two cities, the one upon the ground, the other in the air, and forming no unmeet emblem of the ancient classification of the citizens of Nuremberg into plebeian and patrician.

To walk through Nuremberg with the hasty step and cursory eye with which a mere modern town may be surveyed is impossible. The city, amid all its decay, is a cabinet of rare curiosities, a gallery of master-pieces. At every step one is brought up by some marvel or other—a witty motto; a quaint device; a droll face; a mediaeval saint in wood, lying as lumber, it may be, in some workshop; a bishop, or knight, or pilgrim, in stone, who has seen better days; an elegant fountain, at which prince or emperor may have stopped to drink, giving its waters as copiously as ever; a superb portal, from which patrician may have walked forth when good Maximilian was emperor; or rich oriel, at which bright eyes looked out when gallant knight rode past; or some palatial mansion that speaks of times when the mariner’s compass was unknown, and the stream of commerce on its way to the West flowed through Nuremberg, and not as now round the Cape, or through the Straits of Gibraltar. After a time the place, so full of fanciful and droll and beautifitl imagining, begins to act upon one like an enchantment. The spirit that lives in these creations is as unabated as if the artist had just laid down his chisel. One cannot persuade one’s self that the hands that fashioned them have long ago mouldered into dust. No; their authors are living still, and one looks to see them walk out at their doors, and feels sure that one would know them — those cunning men, that race of geniuses, whose wit and wisdom, whose humor and drollery and mirth burst out and overflowed till the very stones of their city laughed along with them. Where are all these men now?

All sleeping together in the burial-ground, about a mile and a half outside the city gate, each in his narrow cell, the skill of their right hand forgotten, but the spelI of their power still lingering on the city where they lived, to fascinate and delight and instruct the men of after-times.

Of the edifices of Nuremberg we shall visit only one—the Rath-Haus, or Hotel de Ville, where the Diets of the Empire held their sitting, and where, of course, the Diet that had just ended in the resolution which so exasperated Campeggio and terrified the Vatican had held its deliberations.

It is a magnificent pile, in the Italian style, and externally in perfect preservation. A lofty portal gives admission to a spacious quadrangle. This building was erected in 1619, but it includes an older town-hall of date 1340. To this older portion belongs the great saloon, variously used in former times as a banqueting hall, an audience chamber, and a place of conference for the Diet. Its floor looks as if it would afford standing-room for all the citizens of Nuremberg. But vastness is the only attribute now left it of its former splendor. It is long since emperor trod that floor, or warrior feasted under that roof, or Diet assembled within those walls.

Time’s effacing finger has been busy with it, and what was magnificence in the days of the emperor, is in ours simply tawdriness. The paintings on its walls and roof, some of which are from the pencil of Albert Durer, have lost their brilliance, and are now little better than mere patches of color.

The gloss has passed from the silks and velvets of its furniture; the few chairs that remain are rickety and worm-eaten, and one fears to trust one’s self to them. A magnificent chandelier still hangs suspended from the roof, its gilding sadly tarnished, its lights burned out; and suggesting, as it does, to the mind the gaiety of the past, makes the dreariness and solitariness of the present to be only the more felt. So passes the glory of the world, and so has passed the imperial grandeur which often found in this hall a stage for its display.

Let us visit the dungeons immediately below the building. This will help us to form some idea of the horrors through which Liberty had to pass in her march down to modern times. Our guide leaves us for a few minutes, and when he returns he is carrying a bunch of keys in one hand and a lantern in the other. We descend a flight of stairs, and stand before a great wooden door. It is fastened crosswise with a heavy iron bar, which the guide removes. Then, selecting a key from the bunch, he undoes one lock, then another, and heaving back the ponderous door, we enter and take our first step into the gloom. We traverse a long dark corridor; at the end of it we come to another massy door, secured like the first by a heavy cross-beam.

The guide undoes the fastenings, and with a creak which echoes drearily through the vaulted passage, the door is thrown open and gives us admittance. We descend several flights of stairs. The last ray of light has forsaken us a long while ago, but we go forward by the help of the lantern.

What a contrast to the gilded and painted chambers above!

On either hand as we go on are the silent stone walls; overhead is the vaulted roof; at every other pace the guide stops, and calls our attention to doors in the wall on either hand, which open into numerous side chambers, or vaulted dungeons, for the reception of prisoners. To lie here, in this living grave, in utter darkness, in cold and misery, was dreadful enough; but there were more horrible things near at hand, ready to do their terrible work, and which made the unhappy occupants of these cells forget all the other honors of their dismal abode.

Passing on a pace or two further, we come to a roomier cell. We enter it, and the guide throws the glare of his lantern all round, and shows us the apparatus of torture, which rots here unused, though not unused in former days. It is a gaunt iron frame, resembling a long and narrow bedstead, fitted from end to end with a series of angular rollers. The person who was to undergo the torture was laid on this horizontal rack. With every motion of his body to and fro, the rolling prisms on which he rested grazed the vertebrae of his back, causing great suffering. This was one mode of applying the rack, the next was still more frightful. The feet of the poor victim were fastened to one end of the iron frame; his arms were raised over his head and tied with a rope, which wound round a windlass. The windlass was worked by a lever; the executioner put his hand on the lever; the windlass revolves; the rope tightens; the limbs of the victim are stretched. Another wrench: his eyes flash, his lips quiver, his teeth are clenched; he groans, he shrieks; the joints start from their sockets; and now the livid face and the sinking pulse tell that the torture has been prolonged to the furthest limit of physical endurance. The sufferer is carried back to his cell. In the course of a few weeks, when his mangled body has regained a little strength, he is brought out a second time, and laid upon the same bed of torture, to undergo yet again the same dreadful ordeal.

Let us go forward a little farther into this subterranean realm. We come at length to the central chamber. It is much more roomy than the others. Its air is dank and cold, and the water is filtering through the rock overhead. It is full of darkness, but there are worse things in it than darkness, which we can see by the help of our guide’s lantern. Against the wall leans what seems a ladder; it is a machine of torture of the kind we have already described, only used vertically instead of horizontally. The person is hauled up by a rope, with a weight attached to his feet, and then he is let suddenly down, the rolling prisms grazing, as before, his naked back in his rapid descent.

There is yet another “torture” in this horrible chamber. In the center of the roof is an iron ring. Through the ring passes a strong iron chain, which hangs down and is attached to a windlass. On the floor lies a great block of stone with a ring in it. This block was attached to the feet of the victim; his hands were tied behind his back with the iron chain; and, thus bound, he was pulled up to the roof, and suddenly let fall to within a foot or so of the floor. The jerk of the descending block was so severe as commonly to dislocate his limbs.

The unhappy man when suspended in this fashion could be dealt with as his tormentors chose. They could tear his flesh with pincers, scorch his feet with live coals, insert burning matches beneath his skin, flay him alive, or practice upon him any barbarity their malignity or cruelty suggested.

The subject is an ungrateful one, and we quit it. These cells were reserved for political offenders. They were accounted too good for those tainted with heretical pravity. Deeper dungeons, and more horrible instruments of torture, were prepared for the confessors of the Gospel. The memorials of the awful cruelties perpetrated on the Protestants of the sixteenth century are to be seen in Nuremberg at this day. The “Holy Offices” of Spain and Italy have been dismantled, and little now remains save the walls of the buildings in which the business of the Inquisition was carried on; but, strange to say, in Nuremberg, as we can testify from actual observation, the whole apparatus of torture is still shown in the subterranean chambers that were used by the agents of the “Holy Office.” We reserve the description of these dungeons, with their horrible instruments, till we come to speak more particularly of the Inquisition. Even the political prisons are sufficiently dismal. It is sad to think that such prisons existed in the heart of Germany, and in the free town of Nuremberg, in the sixteenth century.

The far-famed “prisons of Venice”—and here too we speak from actual inspection—are not half so gloomy and terrible. These dungeons in Nuremberg show us how stern a thing government was in the Middle Ages, before the Reformation had come with its balmy breath to chase away the world’s winter, and temper the rigors of law, by teaching mercy as well as vengeance to the ruler. Verily it was no easy matter to be a patriot in the sixteenth century!

CHAPTER - THE RATISBON LEAGUE AND REFORMATION.

Protestantism in Nuremberg—German Provinces Declare for the Gospel—Intrigues of Campeggio—Ratisbon League —Ratisbon Scheme of Reform—Rejected by the German Princes—Letter of Pope Clement to the Emperor—The Emperor’s Letter from Burgos—Forbids the Diet at Spires—German Unity Broken—Two Camps—Persecution—Martyrs.

PICTURE: Albert Durer PICTURE: View of Burgos showing the Cathedral NUREMBERG had thrown itself heartily into the tide of the Reform movement. It was not to be kept back either by the muttered displeasure of the Pope’s legate, or the more outspoken threatenings of the emperor’s envoy. The intelligent citizens of Nuremberg felt that Protestantism brought with it a genial air, in which they could more freely breathe. It promised a re-invigoration to their city, the commerce of which had begun to wane, and its arts to decline, as the consequence of the revolutions which the mariner’s compass had brought with it. Their preachers appeared daily in the pulpit; crowded congregations daily assembled in the large Church of St. Sebald, on the northern bank of the Pegnitz, and in the yet more spacious Cathedral of St. Lawrence, in the southern quarter of the city. The tapers were extinguished; the images stood neglected in their niches, or were turned out of doors; neither pyx, nor cloud of incense, nor consecrated wafer was to be seen; the altar had been changed into a table; bread and wine were brought forth and placed upon it: prayer was offered, a psalm sung, and the elements were dispensed, while some 4,000 communicants came forward to partake. The spectacle caused infinite disgust to Campeggio, but how to prevent it he knew not. Hunnaart thought, doubtless, that had his master been present, these haughty citizens would not have dared to flaunt their heresy in the face of the emperor. But Charles detained by his quarrels with Francis I. and the troubles in Spain, heresy flourished unchecked by the imperial frown.

From the hour the Diet broke up, both sides began busily to prepare for the meeting at Spires in November. The princes, on their return to their States, began to collect the suffrages of their people on the question of Church Reform; and the legate, on his part, without a day’s delay, began his intrigues to prevent the meeting of an assembly which threatened to deliver the heaviest blow his master’s authority had yet received.

The success of the princes friendly to the Reformed faith exceeded their expectations. The all but unanimous declaration of the provinces was, “We will serve Rome no longer.” Franconia, Brandenburg, Henneburg, Windsheim, Wertheim, and Nuremberg declared against the abuses of the mass, against the seven Popish Sacraments, against the adoration of images, and, reserving the unkindliest cut for the last, against the Papal supremacy. 1 These dogmatic changes would draw after them a host of administrative reforms. The pretext for the innumerable Romish exactions, of which the Germans so loudly complained, would be swept away. No longer would come functions and graces from Rome, and the gold of Germany would cease to flow thither in return. The Protestant theologians were overjoyed. A few months, and the national voice, through its constituted organ the Diet, will have pronounced in favor of Reform. The movement will be safely piloted into the harbor.

The consternation of the Romish party was in proportion. They saw the gates of the North opening a second time, and the German hosts in full march upon the Eternal City. What was to be done? Campeggio was on the spot; and it was fortunate for Rome that he was so, otherwise the subsequent intervention of the Pope and the emperor might have come too late. The legate adopted the old policy of “divide and conquer.”

Withdrawing from a Diet which contemplated usurping the most august functions of his master, Campeggio retired to Ratisbon, and there set to work to form a party among the princes of Germany. He succeeded in drawing around him Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, the Dukes of Bavaria, the Archbishop of Salzburg, and the Bishops of Trent and Ratisbon. These were afterwards joined by most of the bishops of Southern Germany. Campeggio represented to this convention that the triumph of Wittenberg was imminent, and that with the fall of the Papacy was bound up the destruction of their own power, and the dissolution of the existing order of things. To avert these terrible evils, they resolved, the 6th of July, to forbid the printing of Luther’s books; to permit no married priests to live in their territories; to recall the youth of their dominions who were studying at Wittenberg; to tolerate no change in the mass or public worship; and, in fine, to put into execution the Edict of Worms against Luther. They concluded, in short, to wage a war of extermination against the new faith. As a set-off against these stern measures, they promised a few very mild reforms. The ecclesiastical imposts were to be lightened, and the Church festivals made somewhat less numerous. And, not able apparently to see that they were falling into the error which they condemned in the proposed Diet at Spires, they proceeded to enact a standard of orthodoxy, consisting of the first four Latin Fathers—Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory—whose opinions were to be the rule according to which all preachers were to interpret Scripture. Such was the Ratisbon Reformation, as it came afterwards to be called.

The publication of the legate’s project was viewed as an insult by the princes of the opposite party. “What right,” they asked, “have a few princes and bishops to constitute themselves the representatives of the nation, and to make a law for the whole of Germany? Who gave them this authority? Besides, what good will a Reformation do us that removes only the smaller abuses, and leaves the great altogether untouched? It is not the humbler clergy, but the prelates and abbots who oppress us, and these the Ratisbon Convention leaves flourishing in their wealth and power. Nor does this Reform give us the smallest hope that we shall be protected in future from the manifold exactions of the Roman court. In condemning the lesser evils, does not the League sanction the greater?” Even Pallavicino has acknowledged that this judgement of the princes on the Ratisbon Reformation was just, when he says that “the physician in the cure of his patient ought to begin not with the small, but the great remedies.” The legate had done well, and now the Pope, who saw that he must grasp the keys more firmly, or surrender them altogether, followed up with vigor the measures of Campeggio. Clement VII. wrote in urgent terms to Charles V., telling him that the Empire was in even greater danger from these audacious Germans than the tiara. Charles did not need this spur. He was sufficiently alive to what was due to him as emperor. This proposal of the princes to hold a Diet irrespective of the emperor’s authority stung him to the quick.

The Pope’s letter found the emperor at Burgos, the capital of Old Castile.

The air of the place was not favorable to concessions to Lutheranism.

Everything around Charles—a cathedral of un-rivalled magnificence, the lordly priests by which it was served, the devotion of the Castilians, with other tokens of the pomp and power of Catholicism—must have inspired him with even more than his usual reverence for the old religion, and made the project of the princes appear in his eyes doubly a crime. He wrote in sharp terms to them, saying that it belonged to him as emperor to demand of the Pope that a Council should be convoked; that he and the Pope alone were the judges when it was a fitting time to convoke such an assembly, and that when he saw that a Council could be held with profit to Christendom he would ask the Pope to summon one; that, meanwhile, till a General Council should meet, it was their duty to acquiesce in the ecclesiastical settlement which had been made at Worms; that at that Diet all the matters which they proposed to bring again into discussion at Spires had been determined, and that to meet to discuss them over again was to unsettle them. In fine, he reminded them of the Edict of Worms against Luther, and called on them to put it in execution. He forbade the meeting of the Diet at Spires, under penalty of high treason and ban of the Empire. The princes eventually submitted, and thus the projected Diet, which had excited so great hopes on the one side and so great alarm on the other, never met. The issue of the affair was that the unity of Germany was broken. From this hour, there were a Catholic Diet and a Protestant Diet in the Empire— a Catholic Germany and a Protestant Germany. The rent was made by Campeggio, and what he did was endorsed and completed by Charles V.

The Reformation was developing peacefully in the Empire; the majority of the Diet was on its side; the several States and cities were rallying to it; there was the promise that soon it would be seen advancing under the aegis of a united Fatherland: but this fair prospect was suddenly and fatally blighted by the formation of an Anti-Protestant League. The unity thus broken has never since been restored. It must not be overlooked that this was the doing of the Romanist party. “What a deplorable event!” exclaims the reader. And truly it was. It had to be expiated by the wars, the revolutions, the political and religious strifes of three centuries. Christendom was entering on the peaceful and united rectification of the errors of ages—the removal of those superstitious beliefs which had poisoned the morals of the world, and furnished a basis for ecclesiastical and political despotisms. And, with a purified conscience, there would have come an enlarged and liberated intellect, the best patron of letters and art, of liberty and of industry. With the rise of these two hostile camps, the world’s destinies were fatally changed. Henceforward Protestantism must advance by way of the stake. But, lacking these many heroic deaths, these hundreds of thousands of martyrs, what a splendor would have been lacking to Protestantism!

The conferences at Ratisbon lasted a fortnight, and when at length they came to an end, the Archduke Ferdinand and the Papal legate journeyed together to Vienna. On the road thither, they came to an understanding as to the practical steps for carrying out the league. The sword must be unsheathed. Gaspard Tauber, of Vienna, whose crime was the circulating of Luther’s books, was among the first to suffer. An idea got abroad that he would recant. Two pulpits were erected in the churchyard of St.

Stephen’s. From the one Tauber was to read his recantation, and from the other a priest was to magnify the act as a new trophy of the power of the Roman Church. Tauber rose in presence of the vast multitude assembled in the graveyard, who awaited in deep silence the first words of recantation.

To their amazement he made a bolder confession of his faith than ever. He was immediately dragged to execution, decapitated, and his body thrown into the fire and consumed. His Christian intrepidity on the scaffold made a deep impression on his townsmen. At Buda, in Hungary, a Protestant bookseller was burned with his books piled up around him. He was heard amid the flames proclaiming the joy with which he suffered for the sake of Christ. An inquisitor, named Reichler, traversed Wurtemberg, hanging Lutherans on the trees, and nailing the Reformed preachers to posts by the tongue, and leaving them to die on the spot, or set themselves free at the expense of self-mutilation, and the loss of that gift by which they had served Christ in the ministry of the Gospel. In the territories of the Archbishop of Salzburg, a Protestant who was being conducted to prison was released by two peasants, while his guards were carousing in an alehouse. The peasants were beheaded outside the walls of the city without form of trial. There was a Reign of Terror in Bavaria. It was not on those in humble life only that the storm fell; the magistrate on the bench, the baron in his castle found no protection from the persecutor. The country swarmed with spies, and friend dared not confide in friend.

This fanatical rage extended to some parts of Northern Germany. The tragical fate of Henry van Zutphen deserves a short notice. Escaping from the monastery at Antwerp in 1523, when the converts Esch and Voes were seized and burned, he preached the Gospel for two years in Bremen. His fame as a preacher extending, he was invited to proclaim the Reformed doctrine to the uninstructed people of the Ditmarches country. He repaired thither, and had appeared only once in the pulpit, when the house in which he slept was surrounded at midnight by a mob, heated by the harangues of the prior of the Dominicans and the fumes of Hamburg beer.

He was pulled out of bed, beaten with clubs, dragged on foot over many miles of a road covered with ice and snow, and finally thrown on a slow fire and burned. 5 Such were the means which the “Ratisbon Reformers” adopted for repressing Protestantism, and upholding the old order of things. “The blood he is shedding,” exclaimed Luther, on being told of these proceedings, “will choke the Pope at last, with his kings and kingdoms.” 6

CHAPTER - LUTHER’S VIEWS ON THE SACRAMENT AND IMAGE-WORSHIP.

New Friends—Philip, Landgrave of Hesse—Meeting between him and Melanchthon—Joins the Reformation—Duke Ernest, etc.—Knights of the Teutonic Order—Their Origin and History—Royal House of Prussia— Free Cities—Services to Protestantism—Division—Carlstadt Opposes Luther on the Sacrament—Luther’s Early Views—Recoil —Essence of Paganism—Opus Operatum—Calvin and Zwingli’s View—Carlstadt Leaves Wittenberg and goes to Orlamunde—Scene at the Inn at Jena— Luther Disputes at Orlamunde on Image-Worship—Carlstadt Quits Saxony—Death of the Elector Frederick.

PICTURE: Carlstadt Accepting Luthers Challenge to Write against him WHILE its enemies were forming leagues and un-sheathing their swords against the Reformation, new friends were hastening to place themselves on its side. It was at this hour that some of the more powerful princes of Germany stepped out from the ranks of the Romanists, and inscribed the “evangel” on their banners, declaring that henceforward under this “sign” only would they fight. Over against the camp formed by Austria and Bavaria was pitched that of the Landgrave of Hesse and the free cities.

One day in June, 1524, a knightly cavalcade was passing along the highroad which traverses the plain that divides Frankfort from the Taunus mountains. The party were on their way to the games at Heidelberg. As they rode along, two solitary travelers on horseback were seen approaching. On coming nearer, they were recognised to be Philip Melanchthon and his friend. The knight at the head of the first party, dashing forward, placed himself by the side of the illustrious doctor, and begged him to turn his horse’s head, and accompany him a short way on the road. The prince who accosted Melanchthon was the young Landgrave of Hesse. Philip of Hesse had felt the impulses of the times, and was inquiring whether it was not possible to discover a better way than that of Rome. He had been present at the Diet of Worms; had been thrilled by the address of Luther; he had begged an interview with him immediately after, and ever since had kept revolving the matter in his heart. A chance, as it seemed, had now thrown Melanchthon in his way. He opened his mind to him as he rode along by his side, and, in reply, the doctor gave the prince a clear and comprehensive outline of the Reformed doctrine. This oral statement Melanchthon supplemented, on his return to Wittenberg, by a “written epitome of the renovated doctrines of Christianity,” the study of which made the landgrave resolve to cast in his lot with Protestantism. He embraced it with characteristic ardor, for he did nothing by halves. He made the Gospel be preached in his dominions, and as he brought to the cause the whole energy of his character, and the whole influence of his position, he rendered it no ordinary services. In conflicts to come, his plume was often seen waving in the thick of the battle. About the same time, other princes transferred the homage of their hearts and the services of their lives to the same cause. Among these were Duke Ernest of Luneburg, who now began to promote the reformation of his States; the Elector of the Palatinate; and Frederick I. of Denmark, who, as Duke of Schleswig and Holstein, ordained that all under him should be free to worship God as their consciences might direct.

These accessions were followed by another, on which time has since set the print of vast importance. Its consequences continue to be felt down to our own days. The knight who now transferred his homage to the cause of Protestantism was the head of the house of Prussia, then Margrave of Brandenburg.

The chiefs of the now imperial house of Prussia were originally Burgraves of Nuremberg. They sold, as we have already said, this dignity, and the price they received for it enabled them to purchase the Margraveship of Brandenburg. In 1511, Albert, the then head of the house of Brandenburg, became Grand Master of the Teutonic Order. This was perhaps the most illustrious of all those numerous orders of religious knights, or monks, which were founded during the frenzy of the Crusades, 2 in defense of the Christian faith against heathens and infidels. They wore a white cross as their badge. Albert, the present Grand Master, while attending the Diet at Nuremberg, had listened to the sermons of Osiander, and had begun to doubt the soundness of the Roman creed, and, along with that, the lawfulness of his vow as Grand Master of the Teutonic monks. He obtained an interview with Luther, and asked his advice. “Renounce your Grand-Mastership; dissolve the order,” said the Reformer; “take a wife; and erect your quasi-religious domain into a secular and hereditary duchy.”

Albert, adopting the counsel of Luther, opened to himself and his family the road that at a future day was to conduct to the imperial crown. He renounced his order of monk-hood, professed the Reformed faith, married a princess of Denmark, and declared Prussia an hereditary duchy, doing homage for it to the crown of Poland. He was put under the ban of the Empire; but retained, nevertheless, possession of his dominions. In process of time this rich inheritance fell to the possession of the electoral branch of his family; all dependence on the crown of Poland was cast off; the duchy was converted into a kingdom, and the title of duke exchanged for the loftier one of king. The fortunes of the house continued to grow till at last its head took his place among the great sovereigns of Europe. Another and higher step awaited him. In 1870, at the close of the Franco- German war, the King of Prussia became Emperor of Germany.

In the rear of the princes, and in some instances in advance of them, came the free cities. We have spoken of their rise in a former chapter. They eminently prepared the soil for the reception of Protestantism. They were nurseries of art, cultivators of knowledge, and guardians of liberty. We have already seen that at Nuremberg, during the sittings of the Diet, and despite the presence of the legate of the Pope and the ambassador of the emperor, Protestant sermons were daily preached in the two cathedral churches; and when Campeggio threatened to apprehend and punish the preachers in the name of his master, the municipality spiritedly forbade him to touch a hair of their heads. Other towns followed the example of Nuremberg. The Municipal Diets of Ulm and Spires (1524) resolved that the clergy should be sustained in preaching the pure Gospel, and bound themselves by mutual promise to defend each other against any attempt to execute the Edict of Worms.

At the very moment that Protestantism was receiving these powerful accessions from without, a principle of weakness was being developed within. The Reformers, hitherto a united phalanx, began to be parted into two camps—the Lutheran and the Reformed. It is now that we trace the incipient rise of the two powerful parties which have continued, down to our day, to divide the Protestant world, and to retard the march of the Reformation.

The difference was at first confined to two men. Luther and Carlstadt had combatted by the side of each other at Leipsic against Dr. Eck; unhappily they differed in their views on the Sacrament of the Supper, and began to do battle against each other. Few there are who can follow with equal steps the march of Truth, as she advances from the material and the symbolical to the position of a pure principle. Some lag behind, laying fully as much stress upon the symbol as upon the verity it contains; others outstrip Truth, as it were, by seeking to dissociate her from that organisation which God has seen to be necessary for her action upon the world. The fanatics, who arose at this stage of the Reformation, depreciated the Word and the Sacraments, and, in short, all outward ordinances, maintaining that religion was a thing exclusively of spiritual communion, and that men were to be guided by an inward light. Luther saw clearly that this theory would speedily be the destruction not of what was outward only in religion, but also of what was inward and spiritual. A recoil ensued in his sentiments.

He not only paused in his career, he went back; and the retrogression which we henceforth trace in him was not merely a retrogression from the new mystics, but from his former self. The clearness and boldness which up till this time had characterised his judgment on theological questions now forsook him, and something of the old haze began to gather round him and cloud his mind.

At an earlier period of his career (1520), in his work entitled the Babylonian Captivity, he had expressed himself in terms which implied that the spiritual presence of Christ in the Sacrament was the only presence he recognised there, and that faith in Christ thus present was the only thing necessary to enable one to participate in all the benefits of the Lord’s Supper. This doctrine is in nowise different from that which was afterwards taught on this head by Calvin, and which Luther so zealously opposed in the case of Zwingli and the theologians of the Swiss Reformation. Unhappily, Luther having grasped the true idea of the Lord’s Supper, again lost it. He was unable to retain permanent possession of the ground which he had occupied for a moment, as it were; he fell back to the old semi-materialistic position, to the arrestment of his own career, and the dividing of the Protestant army.

It is a grand principle in Protestantism that the ordinances of the Church become to us “effectual means” of salvation, not from “any virtue in them,” or “in him that administers them,” but solely by the “blessing of God,” and the “working of His Spirit in them that by faith receive them.”

This draws a clear line of distinction between the institutions of the Reformed Church and the rites of Paganism and Romanism. It was a doctrine of Paganism that there was a magical or necromantic influence in all its observances, in virtue of which a purifying change was effected upon the soul of the worshipper. This idea was the essence of Paganism. In the sacrifice, in the lustral water, in every ceremony of its ritual, there resided an invisible but potent power, which of itself renewed or transformed the man who did the rite, or in whose behalf it was done. This doctrine descended to Romanism. In all its priests, and in all its rites, there was lodged a secret, mysterious, superhuman virtue, which regenerated and sanctified men. It was called the “opus operatum,” because, according to this theory, salvation came simply by the performance of the rite—the “doing of the work.” It was not the Spirit that regenerated man, nor was faith on his part necessary in order to his profiting; the work was accomplished by the sole and inherent potency of the rite. This doctrine converts the ordinances of the Gospel into spells, and makes their working simply magical.

Luther was on the point of fully emancipating himself from this belief. As regards the doctrines of Christianity, he did fully emancipate himself from it. His doctrine of justification by faith alone implied the total renunciation of this idea; but, as regards the Sacraments, he did not so fully vindicate his freedom from the old beliefs. With reference to the Supper, he lost sight of the grand master-truth which led to the emancipation of himself and Christendom from monkish bondage. He could see that faith alone in Christ’s obedience and death could avail for the justification, the pardon, and the eternal salvation of the sinner; and yet he could not see that faith alone in Christ, as spiritually present in the Supper, could avail for the nourishment of the believer. Yet the latter is but another application of Luther’s great cardinal doctrine of justification by faith, The shock Luther received from the extremes to which the Anabaptists proceeded in good part accounts for this result. He saw, as he thought, the whole of Christianity about to be spiritualised, and to lose itself a second time in the mazes of mysticism. He retreated, therefore, into the doctrine of impanation or consubstantiation, which the Dominican, John of Paris, broached in the end of the thirteenth century. According to this tenet, the body and blood of Christ are really and corporeally present in the elements, but the substance of the bread and wine also remains.

Luther held that in, under, or along with the elements was Christ’s very body; so that, after consecration, the bread was both bread and the flesh of Christ, and the wine both wine and the blood of Christ. He defended his belief by a literal interpretation of the words of institution, “This is my body.” “I have undergone many hard struggles,” we find him saying, “and would fain have forced myself into believing a doctrine whereby I could have struck a mighty blow at the Papacy. But the text of Scripture is too potent for me; I am a captive to it, and cannot get away.”

Carlstadt refused to bow to the authority of the great doctor on this point.

He agreed with the Luther of 1520, not with the Luther of 1524. Carlstadt held that there was no corporeal presence of Christ in the elements; that the consecration effects no change upon the bread and wine; that the Supper is simply commemorative of the death of Christ, and nourishes the communicant by vividly representing that transaction to his faith.

Carlstadt’s views differed widely from those of Luther, but they fell short of the doctrine of the Supper, as it came afterwards to be settled in the controversies that ensued, and finally held by Zwingli and Calvin.

Carlstadt finding himself fettered, as may well be conceived, in the declaration of his opinions at Wittenberg, sought a freer stage on which to ventilate them. Early in 1524 He removed to Orlamunde, and there began to propagate his views. We do not at this stage enter on the controversy. It will come before us afterwards, when greater champions than Carlstadt shall have stepped into the arena, and when accordingly we can review, with much greater profit and advantage, the successive stages of this great war, waged unhappily within the camp of the Reformation.

One passage at arms we must however record. No longer awed by Luther’s presence, Carlstadt’s boldness and zeal waxed greater every day. Not content with opposing the Wittenberg doctrine of the Supper, he attacked Luther on the subject of images. The old leaven of monkhood—the strength of which was shown in the awful struggles he had to undergo before he found his way to the Cross—was not wholly purged out of the Reformer. Luther not only tolerated the presence of images in the churches, like Zwingli; for the sake of the weak; he feared to displace them even when the worshippers desired their removal. He believed they might be helpful. Carlstadt denounced these tendencies and weaknesses as Popery. The minds of the men of Orlamunde were getting inflamed by the violence of his harangues; commotions were rising, and the Elector sent Luther to Orlamunde to smooth the troubled waters. A little reflection might have taught Frederick that his presence was more likely to bring on a tempest; for the Reformer was beginning to halt in that equanimity and calm strength which, up till this time, he had been able to exercise in the face of opposition.

Luther on his way to Orlamunde traveled by Jena, where he arrived on the 21st August, 1524. From this city he wrote to the Elector and Duke John, exhorting them to employ their power in curbing that fanatical spirit, which was beginning to give birth to acts of violence. The exhortation was hardly needed, seeing he was at that moment on a mission from the Elector for that very end. It shows, however, that in Luther’s opinion the Reformation ran more risk from the madness of the fanatic than from the violence of the persecutor: “The fanatic,” he said in his letter, “hates the Word of God, and exclaims, ‘Bible, Bubel, Babel!’ 4 What kind of tree is that which bears such fruit as the breaking open of churches and cloisters, and the burning of images and saints? Christians ought to use the Word , not the hand. The New Testament method of driving out the devil is to convert the heart, and then the devil falls and all his works.” Next day he preached against insurrectionary tumults, iconoclast violence, and the denial of the real presence in the Eucharist. Afterwards, as he was seated at dinner with the pastor of Jena and the city functionaries, a paper was handed in to him from Carlstadt. “Let him come in,” said Luther.

Carlstadt entered. “You attacked me today,” said Carlstadt to the Reformer, “as an author of sedition and assassination; it is false!” “I did not name you,” rejoined Luther; “nevertheless, if the cap fits you, you may put it on.” “I am able to show,” said Carlstadt, “that you have taught contradictions on the subject of the Eucharist.” “Prove your assertion,” rejoined Luther. “I am willing to dispute publicly with you,” replied Carlstadt, “at Wittenberg or at Erfurt, if you will grant me a safeconduct.” “Never fear that,” said Luther. “You tie my hands and my feet and then you strike me!” exclaimed Carlstadt with warmth. “Write against me,” said Luther. “I would,” said the other, “if I knew you to be in earnest.” “Here,” exclaimed Luther, “take that in token of my earnestness,” holding out a gold florin. “I willingly accept the gage,” said Carlstadt. Then holding it out to the company, “Ye are my witnesses,” said he, “that this is my authority to write against Martin Luther.” He bent the florin and put it into his purse. He then extended his hand to Luther, who pledged him in some wine. “The more vigorously you assault me,” said Luther, “the better you will please me.” “It shall not be my fault,” answered Carlstadt, “if I fail.” They drank to one another, and again shaking hands, Carlstadt withdrew.

The details of this interview are found only in the records of the party adverse to the Reformer, and Luther has charged them with gross exaggeration.

From Jena, Luther continued his journey, and arrived at Orlamunde in the end of August. The Reformer himself has given us no account of his disputation with Carlstadt. The account which historians commonly follow is that of Reinhard, a pastor of Jena, and an eye-witness. Its accuracy has been challenged by Luther, and, seeing Reinhard was a friend of Carlstadt, it is not improbably colored. But making every allowance, Luther appears to have been too much in haste to open this breach in the Protestant army, and he took the responsibility too lightly, forgetful of the truth which Melchior Adam has enunciated, and which experience has a thousand times verified, “that a single spark will often suffice to wrap in flames a whole forest.” As regards the argument Luther won no victory; he found the waters ruffled, and he lashed them into tempest.

Assembling the town council and the citizens of Orlamunde, Luther was addressing them when Carlstadt entered. Walking up to Luther, Carlstadt saluted him: “Dear doctor, if you please, I will induct you.” “You are my antagonist,” Luther replied, “I have pledged you with a florin.” “I shall ever be your antagonist,” rejoined the other, “so long as you are an antagonist to God and His Word.” Luther on this insisted that Carlstadt should withdraw, seeing that he could not transact the business on which he had come at the Elector’s command, in his presence. Cartstadt refused, on the ground that it was a free meeting, and if he was in fault why should his presence be feared? On this Luther turned to his attendant, and ordered him to put-to the horses at once, for he should immediately leave the town, whereupon Carlstadt withdrew.

Being now alone with the men of Orlamunde, Luther proceeded with the business the Elector had sent him to transact, which was to remove their iconoclast prejudices, and quiet the agitation of their city. “Prove to me,” said Luther, opening the discussion, “prove to me by Scripture that images ought to be destroyed.” “Mr. Doctor,” rejoined a councillor, “do you grant me thus much—that Moses knew God’s commandments?” Then opening a Bible he read these words: “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, or the likeness of anything.” This was as much as to say, Prove to me from Scripture that images ought to be worshipped. “That passage refers to images of idols only,” responded Luther. “If I have hung up in my room a crucifix which I do not worship, what harm can it do me? ” This was Zwingli’s ground; but Luther was not yet able fully to occupy it. “I have often,” said a shoemaker, “taken off my hat to an image in a room or on the road; to do so is an act of idolatry, which takes from God the glory that is due to Him alone.” “Because of their being abused, then,” replied Luther, “we ought to destroy women, and pour out wine into the streets.” “No,” was the reply; “these are God’s creatures, which we are not commanded to destroy.”

It is easy to see that images were not things of mere indifference to Luther.

He could not divest himself of a certain veneration for them. He feared to put forth his hand and pull them down, nor would he permit those that would. Immediately on the close of the discussion he left Orlamunde, amid very emphatic marks of popular disfavor. It was the one field, of the many on which he contended, from which he was fated to retire with dishonor.

Carlstadt did not stop here. He began to throw his influence into the scale of the visionaries, and to declaim bitterly against Luther and the Lutherans.

This was more than the Elector Frederick could endure. He ordered Carlstadt to quit his dominions; and the latter, obeying, wandered southward, in the direction of Switzerland, propagating wherever he came his views on the Supper; but venting, still more zealously and loudly, his hatred of Luther, whom he accused as the author of all his calamities. The aged Elector, at whose orders he had quitted Saxony, was beginning to fear that the Reformation was advancing too far. His faith in the Reformed doctrine continued to grow, and was only the stronger the nearer he came to his latter end, which was now not far off; but the political signs dismayed him. The unsettling of men’s minds, and the many new and wild notions that were vented, and which were the necessary. concomitants of the great revolution in progress, caused him alarm. The horizon was darkening all round, but the good Frederick went to his grave in peace, and saw not those tempests which were destined to shake the world at the birth of Protestantism.

All was peace in the chamber where Frederick the Wise breathed his last.

On the 4th of May (1525) he dictated to an amanuensis his last instructions to his brother John, who was to succeed him, and ‘who was then absent with the army in Thuringia. He charged him to deal kindly and tenderly with the peasantry, and to remit the duties on wine and beer. “Be not afraid,” he said, “Our Lord God will richly and graciously compensate us in other ways.” 6 In the evening Spalatin entered the prince’s apartment. “It is right,” said his old master, a smile lighting up his face, “that you should come to see a sick man.” His chair was rolled to the table, and placing his hand in Spalatin’s, he unburdened his mind to him touching the Reformation. His words showed that the clouds that distressed him had rolled away. “The hand of God,” said he, “will guide all to a happy issue.”

On the morning of the following day he received the Sacrament in both kinds. The act was witnessed by his domestics, who stood around dissolved in tears. Imploring their forgivenes, if in anything he had offended then, he bade them all farewell. A will which had been prepared some years before, and in which he had confided his soul to the “Mother of God,” was now brought forth and burned, and another dictated, in which he placed his hopes solely on “the merits of Christ.” This was the last of his labors that pertained to earth; and now he gave all his thoughts to his departure, which was near. Taking into his hand a small treatise on spiritual consolation, which Spalatin had prepared for his use, he essayed to read; but the task was too much for him. Drawing near his couch, his chaplain recited some promises from the Word of God, of which the Elector, in his latter years, had been a diligent and devout student. A serenity and refreshment of soul came along with the words; and at five of the afternoon he departed so peacefully, that it was only by bending over him that his physician saw he had ceased to breathe. 7

CHAPTER - WAR OF THE PEASANTS.

A New Danger—German Peasantry—Their Oppressions—These grow Worse—The Reformation Seeks to Alleviate them—The Outbreak—The Reformation Accused—The Twelve Articles—These Rejected by the Princes—Luther’s Course—His Admonitions to the Clergy and the Peasantry—Rebellion in Suabia—Extends to Franconia, etc.—The Black Forest—Peasant Army—Ravages—Slaughterings—Count Louis of Helfenstein—Extends to the Rhine—Universal Terror—Army of the Princes—Insurrection Arrested—Weinsberg—Retaliation—Thomas Munzer—Lessons of the Outbreak.

PICTURE: Death of Frederick the Wise Elector of Saxony PICTURE: The Chartreuse of Pavia THE sun of the Reformation was mounting into the sky, and promising to fill the world with light. In a moment a cloud gathered, overspread the firmament, and threatened to quench the young day in the darkness of a horrible night.

The troubles that now arose had not been foreseen by Luther. That the Pope, whom the Reformation would despoil of the triple crown, with all the spiritual glory and temporal power attendant thereon, should anathematise it; that the emperor, whose scheme of policy and ambition it thwarted, should make war against it; and that the numerous orders of the mitre and the cowl should swell the opposition; was to be expected; but that the people, from whose eyes it was to tear the bandage of spiritual darkness, and from whose arms it was to rend the fetters of temporal bondage, should seek to destroy it, had not entered into Luther’s calculations. Yet now a terrible blow—the greatest the Reformation had as yet sustained—came upon it, not from the Pope, nor from the emperor, but from the people.

The oppressions of the German peasantry had been growing for centuries.

They had long since been stripped of the rude privileges their fathers enjoyed. They could no longer roam their forests at will, kill what game they pleased, and build their hut on whatever spot taste or convenience dictated. Not only were they robbed of their ancient rights, they were compelled to submit to new and galling restrictions. Tied to their native acres, in many instances, they were compelled, to expend their sweat in tilling the fields, and spin their blood in maintaining the quarrels of their masters. To temporal oppression was added ecclesiastical bondage. The small portion of earthly goods which the baron had left them, the priest wrung from them by spiritual threats, thus filling their cup of suffering to the brim. The power of contrast came to embitter their lot. While one part of Germany was sinking into drudgery and destitution, another part was rising into affluence and power. The free towns were making rapid strides in the acquisition of liberty, and their example taught the peasants the way to achieve a like independence—by combination. Letters and arts were awakening thought and prompting to effort. Last of all came the Reformation, and that great power vastly widened the range of human vision, by teaching the essential equality of all men, and weakening the central authority, or key-stone in the arch of Europe—namely, the Papacy. It was now evident to many that the hour had fully come when these wrongs, which dated from ancient times, but which had been greatly aggravated by recent events, must be redressed. The patience of the sufferers was exhausted; they had begun to feel their power; and if their fetters were not loosed by their masters, they would be broken by themselves, and with a blind rage and a destructive fury proportioned to the ignorance in which they had been kept, and the degradation into which they had been sunk. In the words of an eloquent writer and philosopher who flourished in an after-age, “they would break their chains on the heads of their oppressors. Mutterings of the gathering storm had already been heard. Premonitory insurrections and tumults had broken out in several of the German countries. The close of the preceding century had been marked by the revolt of the Boers in Holland, who paraded the country under a flag, on which was blazoned a gigantic cheese. The sixteenth century opened amid similar disturbances. Every two or three years there came a “new league,” followed by a “popular insurrection.” These admonished the princes, civil and spiritual, that they had no alternative, as regarded the future, but reformation or revolution. Spires, Wurtemberg, Carinthia, and Hungary were the successive theaters of these revolts, which all sprang from one cause—oppressive labor, burdens which were growing ever the heavier, and privileges which were waxing ever the narrower. The poor people, dehumanised by ignorance, knew but of one way of righting them-selves— demolishing the castles, wasting the lands, spoiling the treasures, and in some instances slaying the persons of their oppressors.

It was at this hour that the Reformation stepped upon the stage. It came with its healing virtue to change the hearts and tame the passions of men, and so to charm into repose the insurrectionary spirit which threatened to devastate the world. It accomplished its end so far; it would have accomplished it completely, it would have turned the hearts of the princes to their subjects, and the hearts of the people to their rulers, had it been suffered to diffuse itself freely among both classes. Even as it was, it brought with it a pause in these insurrectionary violences, which had begun to be common. But soon its progress was arrested by force, and then it was accused as the author of those evils which it was not permitted to cure. “See,” said Duke George of Saxony, “what an abyss Luther has opened. He has reviled the Pope; he has spoken evil of dignities; he has filled the minds of the people with lofty notions of their own importance; and by his doctrines he has sown the seeds of universal disorder and anarchy. Luther and his Reformation are the cause of the Peasant-war.”

Many besides Duke George found it convenient to shut their eyes to their own misdeeds, and to make the Gospel the scape-goat of calamities of which they themselves were the anthors. Even Erasmus upbraided Luther thus—“We are now reaping the fruits that you have sown.”

Some show of reason was given to these accusations by Thomas Munzer, who imported a religiuus element into this deplorable outbreak. Munzer was a professed disciple of the Reformation, but he held it to be unworthy of a Christian to be guided by any objective authority, even the Word of God. He was called to “liberty,” and the law or limit of that “liberty” was his own inward light. Luther, he affirmed, by instituting ordinances and forms, had established another Popedom; and Munzer disliked the Popedom of Wittenberg even more than he did the Popedom of Rome. The political opinions of Munzer partook of a like freedom with his religious ones. To submit to princes was to serve Belials. We have no superior but God. The Gospel taught that all men were equal; and this he interpreted, or rather misinterpreted, into the democratic doctrine of equality of rank, and community of goods. “We must mortify the body,” said he, “by fasting and simple clothing, look gravely, speak little, and wear a long beard.” “These and such-like things, says Sleidan, “he called the cross.” 3 Such was the man who, girding on “the sword of Gideon,” put himself at the head of the revolted peasantry. He inoculated them with his own visionary spirit, and taught them to aim at a liberty of which their own judgments or passions were the rule.

The peasants put their demands (January, 1525) into twelve articles.

Considering the heated imaginations of those who penned them, these articles were reasonable and moderate. The insurgents craved restitution of certain free domains which had belonged to their ancestors, and certain rights of hunting and fishing which they themselves had enjoyed, but which had been taken from them. They demanded, further, a considerable mitigation of taxes, which burdened them heavily, and which were of comparatively recent imposition. They headed their claim of rights with the free choice of their ministers; and it was a further peculiarity of this document, that each article in it was supported by a text from Scripture. An enlightened policy would have conceded these demands in the main.

Wise rulers would have said. “Let us make these minions free of the earth, of the waters, and of the forests, as their fathers were; from serfs let us convert them into free men. It is better that their skin should enrich, and their valor defend our territories, than that their blood should water them.”

Alas! there was not wisdom enough in the age to adopt such a course.

Those on whom these claims were pressed said, “No,” with their hands upon their swords.

The vessel of the Reformation was now passing between the Scylla of established despotism and the Charybdis of popular lawlessness. It required rare skill to steer it aright. Shall Luther ally his movement with that of the peasantry? We can imagine him under some temptation to essay ruling the tempest, in the hope of directing its fury to the overthrow of a system which he regarded as the parent of all the oppressions and miseries that filled Christendom, and had brought on at last this mighty convulsion. One less spiritual in mind, and with less faith in the inherent vitalities of the Reformation might have been seduced into linking his cause with this tempest. Luther shrank from such a course. He knew that to ally so holy a cause as the Reformation with a movement at best but political, would be to profane it; and that to borrow the sword of men in its behalf was the sure way to forfeit the help of that mightier sword which alone could will such a battle. The Reformation had its own path and its own weapons, to which if it adhered, it would assuredly triumph in the end. It would correct all wrongs, would explode all errors, and pacify all feuds, but only by propagating its own principles, and diffusing its own spirit among men. Luther, therefore, stood apart.

But this enabled him all the more, at the right moment, to come in effectively between the oppressor and the oppressed, and to tell a little of the truth to both. 5 Turning to the princes he reminded them of the long course of tyranny which they and their fathers had exercised over the poor people. To the bishops he spoke yet more plainly. They had hidden the light of the Gospel from the people; they had substituted cheats and fables for the doctrines of Revelation; they had lettered men by unholy vows, and fleeced them by unrighteous impositions, and now they were reaping as they had sowed. To be angry at the peasants, he told them, was to be guilty of the folly of the man who vents his passion against the rod with which he is struck instead of the hand that wields it. The peasantry was but the instrument in the hand of God for their chastisement.

Luther next addressed himself to the insurgents. He acknowledged that their complaints were not without cause, and thus he showed that he had a heart which could sympathize with them in their miseries, but he faithfully told them that they had taken the wrong course to remedy them. They would never mitigate their lot by rebellion; they must exercise Christian submission, and wait the gradual but certain rectification of their individual wrongs, and those of society at large, by the Divine, healing power of the Gospel. He sought to enforce his admonition by his own example. He had not taken the sword; he had relied on the sole instrumentality of the Gospel, and they themselves knew how much it had done in a very few years to shake the power of an oppressive hierarchy, with the political despotism that upheld it, and to ameliorate the condition of Christendom.

No army could have accomplished half the work in double the time. He implored them to permit this process to go on. It is preachers, not soldiers—the Gospel, not rebellion, that is to benefit the world. And he warned them that if they should oppose the Gospel in the name of the Gospel, they would only rivet the yoke of their enemies upon their neck. The courage of the Reformer is not less conspicuous than his wisdom, in speaking thus plainly to two such parties at such an hour. But Luther had but small thanks for his fidelity. The princes accused him of throwing his shield over rebellion, because he refused to pronounce an unqualified condemnation of the peasantry; and the peasants blamed him as truckling to the princes, because he was not wholly with the insurrection. Posterity has judged otherwise. At this, as at every other crisis, Luther acted with profound moderation and wisdom. His mediation failed, however, and the storm now burst.

The first insurrectionary cloud rolled up in Suabia, from beside the sources of the Danube. It made its appearance in the summer of 1524. The insurrectionary spirit ran like wildfire along the Danube, kindling the peasantry into revolt, and fining the towns with tumults, seditions, and terrors. By the end of the year Thuringia, Franconia, and part of Saxony were in a blaze. When the spring of 1525 opened, the conflagration spread wider still. It was now that the “twelve articles,” to which we have referred above, were published, and became the standard for the insurgents to rally round. John Muller, of Bulbenbach, traversed the region of the Black Forest, attired in a red gown and a red cap, preceded by the tricolor—red, black, and white—and followed by a herald, who read aloud the “twelve articles,” and demanded the adherence of the inhabitants of the districts through which he passed. The peasant army that followed him was continually reinforced by new accessions. Towns too feeble to resist these formidable bands, opened their gates at their approach, and not a few knights and barons, impelled by terror, joined their ranks.

The excitement of the insurgents soon grew into fury. Their march was no longer tumultuous simply, it had now become destructive and desolating.

The country in their rear resembled the track over which all invading and plundering host had passed. Fields were trampled down, barns and storehouses were rifled, the castles of the nobility were demolished, and the convents were burned to the ground. 7 More cruel violences than these did this army of insurgents inflict. They now began to dye their path with the blood of unhappy victims. They slaughtered mercilessly those who fell into their power. On Easter Day (April 16th, 1525) they surprised Weinsberg, in Suabia. Its garrison they condemned to death. The fate of its commander, Count Louis of Helfenstein, was heart-rending in the extreme. His wife, the natural daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, threw herself at the feet of the insurgents, and, holding her infant son in her arms, besought them, with a flood of tears, to spare her husband. 8 It was in vain. They lowered their pikes, and ran him through. 9 He fell pierced by innumerable wounds.

It seemed as if this conflagration was destined to rage till it had devoured all Christendom; as if the work of destruction would go on till all the fences of order were torn down, and all the symbols of authority defaced, and pause in its career only when it had issued in a universal democracy, in which neither rank nor property would be recognised. It extended on the west to the Rhine, where it stirred into tumult the towns of Spires, Worms, and Cologne, and infected the Palatinate with its fever of sanguinary vengeance. It invaded Alsace and Lorraine. It convulsed Bavaria, and Wurtemberg as far as the Tyrol. Its area extended from Saxony to the Alps. Bishops and nobles fled before it. The princes, taken, by surprise, were without combination and without spirit, 10 and, to use the language of Scripture, were “chased as the rolling thing before the whirlwind.”

But soon they recovered from their stupor, and got together their forces.

Albert, Count of Mansfeld, was the first to take the fieid, He was joined, with characteristic spirit and gallantry, by Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, who was soon followed by John, Elector of Saxony, and Henry, Duke of Brunswick, who all joined their forces to oppose the rebel boors. Had the matter rested with the Popish princes, the rebellion would have raged without resistance. On the 15th May, 1525, the confederate army came upon the rebel camp at Frankenhausen, where Munzer presided. Finding the rebels poorly armed, and posted behind a miserable barricade of a few wagons, they sent a messenger with an offer of pardon, on condition of laying down their arms. On Munzer’s advice, the messenger was put to death. Both sides now prepared for battle. The leader of the peasant army, Munzer, addressed them in an enthusiastic and inflammatory harangue, bidding them not fear the army of tyrants they were about to engage; that the sword of the Lord and of Gideon would fight for them; and that they would this day experience a like miraculous deliverance as the Israelites at the Red Sea, as David when he encountered Goliath, and Jonathan when he attacked the garrison of the Philistines. “Be not afraid,” said he, “of their great guns, for in my coat will I catch all the bullets which they shall shoot at you. See ye not how gracious God is unto us? Lift up your eyes, and see that rainbow in the clouds; for, seeing we have the same painted on our banner, God plainly declares by that representation which he shows us from on high that he will stand by us in the battle, and that he will utterly destroy our enemies. Fall on them courageously.” Despite this assurance of victory, the rebel host, at the first onset, fled in the utmost confusion. Munzer was among the first to make his escape. He took refuge in a house near the gate, where he was discovered after the battle, hid in the garret. He was committed to the custody of Duke George.

In this encounter 5,000 of the peasantry were slain, and thus the confederates were at liberty to move their forces into Franconia, where the insurrection still raged with great fury. The insurgents here burned above 200 castles, besides noblemen’s houses and monasteries. They took the town of Wirtzburg, and besieged the castle; but Trusches coming upon them charged, discomfited, and put them to flight.

Luther raised his voice again, but this time to pronounce an unqualified condemnation on a movement which, from a demand for just rights, had become a war of pillage and murder. He called on all to gird on the sword and resist it. The confederate princes made George von Trusches general of their army. Advancing by the side of the Lake of Constance, and dividing his soldiers into three bodies, Trussches attacked the insurgents with vigor.

Several battles were fought, towns and fortresses were besieged; the peasantry contended with a furious bravery, knowing that they must conquer or endure a terrible revenge; but the arms of the princes triumphed. The campaign of this summer sufficed to suppress this formidable insurrection; but a terrible retaliation did the victors inflict upon the fanaticised hordes. They slaughtered them by tens of thousands on the battle-field; they cut them down as they fled; and not unfrequently did they dispatch in cold blood those who had surrendered on promise of pardon. The lowest estimate of the number that perished is 50,000, other accounts raise it to 100,000. When we consider the wide area over which the insurrection extended, and the carnage with which it was suppressed, we shall probably be of opinion that the latter estimate is nearer the truth.

A memorable vengeance was inflicted on Weinsberg, the scene of the death of Count Helfenstein. His murderers were apprehended and executed. The death of one of them was singularly tragic. He was tied to the stake with a chain, that was long enough to permit him to run about. Trusches and other persons of quality then fetched wood, and, strewing it all about, they kindled it into a cruel blaze. As the wretched man bounded wildly round and round amid the blazing faggots, the princes stood by and made sport of his tortures. 12 The town itself was burned to the ground. Munzer, the eclesiastical leader, who had fired the peasantry by harangues, by portents, by assurances that their enemies would be miraculously destroyed, and by undertaking “to catch all the bullets in his sleeve,” 13 after witnessing the failure of his enterprise, was taken and decapitated. Prior to execution he was taken before George, Duke of Saxony, and Landgrave Philip. On being asked why he had misled so many poor people to their ruin, he replied that “he had done only his duty.” The landgrave was at pains to show him that sedition and rebellion are forbidden in the Scriptures, and that Christians are not at liberty to avenge their wrongs by their own private authority. To this he was silent. On the rack he shrieked and laughed by turns; but when about to die he openly acknowledged his error and crimes.

By way of example his head was stuck upon a pole in the open fields. Such horrible ending had the insurrection of the peasants. Ghastly memorials marked the provinces where this tempest had passed; fields wasted, cities overturned, castles and dwellings in ruins, and, more piteous still, corpses dangling from the trees, or gathered in heaps in the fields. The gain remained with Rome. The old worship was in some places restored, and the yoke of feudal bondage was more firmly riveted than before upon the necks of the people.

Nevertheless, the outbreak taught great lessons to the world, worth a hundredfold all the sufferings endured, if only they had been laid to heart.

The peasant-war illustrated the Protestant movement by showing how widely it differed from Romanism, in both its origin and its issues. The insurrection did not manifest itself, or in but the mildest type, at Wittenberg and in the places permeated by the Wittenberg movement.

When it touched ground which the Reformation had occupied, it became that instant powerless. It lacked air to fan it; it found no longer inflammable materials to kindle into a blaze. The Gospel said to this wasting conflagration, “Thus far, but no farther.” Could any man doubt that if Bavaria and the neighboring provinces had been in the same condition with Saxony, there would have been no peasant-war?

This outbreak taught the age, moreover, that Protestantism could no more be advanced by popular violence than it could be suppressed by aristocratic tyranny. It was independent of both; it must advance by its own inherent might along its own path. In fine, this terrible outbreak gave timely warning to the world of what the consequences would be of suppressing the Reformation. It showed that underneath the surface of Christendom there was an abyss of evil principles and fiendish passions, which would one day break through and rend society in pieces, unless they were extinguished by a Divine influence. Munzer and his “inward light” was but the precursor of Voltaire and the “illuminati” of his school. The peasants’ war of 1525 was the first opening of “the fountains of the great deep.” The “Terror” was first seen stalking through Germany. It slumbered for two centuries while the religious and political power of Europe was undergoing a process of slow emasculation. Then the “Terror” again awoke, and the blasphemies, massacres, and wars of the French Revolution overwhelmed Europe.

CHAPTER - THE BATTLE OF PAVIA AND ITS INFLUENCE ON PROTESTANTISM.

The Papacy Entangles itself with Earthly Interests—Protestantism stands Alone—Monarchy and the Popedom—Which is to Rule?—The Conflict a Defence in Protestantism—War between the Emperor and Francis I.— Expulsion of the French from Italy—Battle of Pavia—Capture and Captivity of Francis I.—Charles V. at the Head of Europe— Protestantism to be Extirpated—Luther Marries—The Nuns of Nimptsch—Catherine von Bora—Antichrist about to be Born—What Luther’s Marriage said to Rome.

PICTURE: Cardinal Wolsey THERE Was one obvious difference between that movement of which Rome was the headquarters, and that of which Wittenberg was the center.

The Popedom mixed itself up with the politics of Europe; Protestantism, on the other hand, stood apart, and refused to ally itself with earthly confederacies. The consequence was that the Papacy had to shape its course to suit the will of those on whom it leaned. It rose and fell with the interests with which it had cast in its lot. The loss of a battle or the fall of a statesman would, at times, bring it to the brink of ruin. Protestantism, on the other hand, was free to hold its own course and to develop its own principles. The fall of monarchs and the changes in the political world gave it no uneasiness. Instead of fixing its gaze on the troubled ocean around it, its eye was lifted to heaven.

At this hour intrigues, ambitions, and wars were rife all round Protestantism. The Kings of Spain and France were striving with one another for the possession of Italy. The Pope thought, of course, that he had a better right than either to be master in that country. He was jealous of both monarchs, and shaped his policy so as to make the power of the one balance and check that of the other. He hoped to be able one day to drive both out of the peninsula, if not by arms, yet by arts; but till that day should come, his safety lay in appearing to be the friend of both, and in taking care that the one should not be very much stronger than the other.

All three—the Emperor, the King of France, and the Pope—in whatever else they differed, were the enemies of the Reformation; and had they united their arms they would have been strong enough, in all reckoning of human chances, to put down the Protestant movement. But their dynastic ambitions, fomented largely by the personal piques and crafty and ambitious projects of the men around them, kept them at almost perpetual feud. Each aspired to be the first man of his time. The Pope was still dreaming of restoring to the Papal See the supremacy which it possessed in the days of Gregory VII. and Innocent III., and of dictating to both Charles and Francis. These sovereigns, on the other hand, were determined not to let go the superiority which they had at last achieved over the tiara.

The struggle of monarchy to keep what it had got, of the tiara to regain what it had lost, and of all three to be uppermost, filled their lives with disquiet, their kingdoms with misery, and their age with war. But these rivalries were a wall of defense around that Divine principle which was growing up into majestic stature in a world shaken by the many furious storms that were raging on it.

Scarce had the young emperor Charles V. thrown down the gage of battle to Protestantism, when these tempests broke in from many quarters. He had just fulminated the edict which consigned Luther to destruction, and was drawing his sword to execute it, when a quarrel broke out between himself and Francis I. The French army, crossing the Pyrenees, overran Navarre and entered Castile. The emperor hastened back to Spain to take measures for the defense of his kingdom. The war, thus begun, lasted till 1524, and ended in the expulsion of the French from Milan and Genoa, where they had been powerful ever since the days of Charles VIII. Nor did hostilities end here. The emperor, indignant at the invasion of his kingdom, and wishing to chastise his rival on his own soil, sent his army into France.

The chivalry of Francis I., and the patriotic valor of his subjects, drove back the invaders. But the French king, not content with having rid himself of the soldiers of Spain, would chastise the emperor in his turn. He followed the Spanish army into Itay, and sought to recover the cities and provinces whereof he had recently been despoiled, and which were all the dearer to him that they were situated in a land to which he was ever exceedingly desirous of stretching his scepter, but from which he was so often compelled, to his humiliation, again to draw it back.

The winter of 1525 beheld the Spanish and French armies face to face under the walls of Pavia. The place was strongly fortified, and had held out against the French for now two months, although Francis I. had employed in its reduction all the engineering expedients known to the age. Despite the obstinacy of the defenders, it was now evident that the town must fall.

The Spairish garrison, reduced to extremity, sallied forth, and joined battle, with the besiegers with all the energy of despair.

This day was destined to bring with it a terrible reverse in the fortunes of Francis I. Its dawn saw him the first warrior of his age; its evening found him in the abject condition of a captive. His army was defeated under the walls of that city which they had been on the point of entering as conquerors. Ten thousand, including many a gallant knight, lay dead on the field, and the misfortune was crowned by the capture of the king himself, who was taken prisoner in the battle, and carried to Madrid as a trophy of the conqueror. In Spain, Francis I. dragged out a wretched year in captivity. The emperor, elated by his good fortune, and desirous not only of humiliating his royal prisoner, but of depriving him of the power of injuring him in time to come, imposed very hard conditions of ransom.

These the French king readily subscribed, and all the more so that he had not the slightest intention of fulfilling them. “In the treaty of peace, it is stipulated among other things,” says Sleidan, “that the emperor and king shall endeavor to extirpate the enemies of the Christian religion, and the heresies of the sect of the Lutherans. In like manner, that peace being made betwixt them, they should settle the affairs of the public, and make war against the Turk and heretics excommunicated by the Church; for that it was above all things necessary, and that the Pope had often solicited and advised them to bestir themselves therein. That, therefore, in compliance with his desires, they resolved to entreat him that he would appoint a certain day when the ambassadors and deputies of all kings and princes might meet, in a convenient place, with full power and commission to treat of such measures as might seem proper for undertaking a war against the Turk, and also for rooting out heretics and the enemies of the Church.” Other articles were added of a very rigorous kind, such as that the French king should surrender Burgundy to the emperor, and renounce all pretensions to Italy, and deliver up his two eldest sons as hostages for the fulfillment of the stipulations. Having signed the treaty, early in January, 1526, Francis was set at liberty. Crossing the frontier near Irun, and touching French soil once more, he waved his cap in the air, and shouting aloud, “I am yet a king!” he put spurs to his Turkish horse, and galloped along the road to St. John de Luz, where his courtiers waited to welcome him. The hour was now come, so Charles V. thought, when he could deal his long-meditated blow against the Wittenberg heresy. Never since he ascended the throne had he been so much at liberty to pursue the policy to which his wishes prompted. The battle of Pavia had brought the war in Italy to a more prosperous issue than he had dared to hope. France was no longer a thorn in his side. Its monarch, formerly his rival, he had now converted into his ally, or rather, as Charles doubtless believed, into his lieutenant, bound to aid him in his enterprises, and specially in that one that lay nearer his heart than any other. Moreover, the emperor was on excellent terms with the King of England, and it was the interest of the English minister, Cardinal Wolsey, who cherished hopes of the tiara through the powerful influence of Charles, that that good understanding should continue. As regarded Pope Clement, the emperor was on the point of visiting Rome to receive the imperial crown from the Pontiff’s hands, and in addition, doubtless, the apostolic benediction on the enterprise which Charles had in view against an enemy that Clement abhorred more than he did the Turk.

This was a most favorable juncture for prosecuting the battle of the Papacy. The victory of Pavia had left Charles the most puissant monarch in Europe. On all sides was peace, and having vanquished so many foes, surely it would be no difficult matter to extinguish the monk, who had neither sword nor buckler to defend him. Accordingly, Charles now took the first step toward the execution of his design. Sitting down (May 24, 1525) in the stately Alcazar of Toledo, 3 whose rocky foundations are washed by the Tagus, he indited his summons to the princes and States of Germany to meet at Augsburg, and take measures “to defend the Christian religion, and the holy rites and customs received from their ancestors, and to prohibit all pernicious doctrines and innovations.” This edict the emperor supplemented by instructions from Seville, dated March 23, 1526, which, in effect, enjoined the princes to see to the execution of the Edict of Worms. 4 Every hour the tempest that was gathering over Protestantism grew darker.

If at no previous period had the emperor been stronger, or his sword so free to execute his purpose, at no time had Luther been so defenseless as now. His protector, the Elector Frederick, whose circumspection approached timidity, but whose purpose was ever resolute and steady, was now dead. The three princes who stood up in his room—the Elector John, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, and Albert of Prussia—were new to the cause; they lacked the influence which Frederick possessed; they were discouraged, almost dismayed, by the thickening dangers—Germany divided, the Ratisbon League rampant, and the author of the Edict of Worms placed by the unlooked-for victory of Pavia at the head of Europe.

The only man who did not tremble was Luther. Not that he did not see the formidable extent of the danger, but because he was able to realize a Defender whom others could not see. He knew that if the Gospel had been stripped of all earthly defense it was not because it was about to perish, but because a Divine hand was about to be stretched out in its behalf, so visibly as to give proof to the world that it had a Protector, though “unseen,” more powerful than all its enemies. While dreadful fulminations were coming from the other side of the Alps, and while angry and mortal menaces were being hourly uttered in Germany, what did Luther do? Run to his cell, and do penance in sackcloth and ashes to turn away the ire of emperor and Pontiff? No. Taking Catherine von Bors by the hand he led her to the altar, and made her his wife. Catherine von Bora was the daughter of one of the minor nobles of the Saxon Palatinate. Her father’s fortune was not equal to his rank, and this circumstance disabling him from giving Catherine a dowry, he placed her in the convent of Nimptsch, near Grimma, in Saxony. Along with the eight nuns who were the companions of her seclusion, she studied the Scriptures, and from them the sisters came to see that their vow was not binding. The Word of God had unbarred the door of their cell. The nine nuns, leaving the convent in a body, repaired to Wittenberg, and were there maintained by the bounty of the elector, administered through Luther. In process of time all the nuns found husbands, and Kate alone of the nine remained unmarried. The Reformer thus had opportunity of knowing her character and virtues, and appreciating the many accomplishments which were more rarely the ornament of the feminine intellect in those days than they are in ours. The marriage took place on the 11th of June. On the evening of that day, Luther, accompanied by the pastor Pomeranus, whom he had asked to bless the union, repaired to the house of the burgomaster, who had been constituted Kate’s guardian, and there, in the presence of two witnesses—the great painter, Lucas Cranach, and Dr. John Apella — the marriage took place. On the 15th of June, Luther says, in a letter to Ruhel, “I have made the determination to retain nothing of my Papistical life, and thus I have entered the state of matrimony, at the urgent solicitation of my father.” 6 The special purport of the letter was to invite Ruhel to the marriage-feaast, which was to be given on Tuesday, the 27th of June. The old couple from Mansfeld—John and Margaret Luther — were to be present. Ruhel was wealthy, and Luther, with characteristic frankness, tells him that any present he might choose to bring with him would be acceptable. Wenceslaus Link, of Nuremberg, whose nuptials Luther had blessed some time before, was also invited; but, being poor, it was stipulated that he should bring no present. Spalatin was to send some venison, and come himself. Amsdorf also was of the number of the guests.

Philip Melancthon, the dearest friend of all, was absent. We can guess the reason. The bold step of Luther had staggered him. To marry while so many calamities impended! Philip went about some days with an anxious and clouded face, but when the clamor arose his brow cleared, his eye brightened, and he became the warmest. defender of the marriage of the Reformer, in which he was joined by not a few wise and moderate men in the Romish Church. The union was hardly effected when, as we have already hinted, a shout of indignation arose, as if Luther had done some impious and horrible thing. “It is incest!” exclaimed Henry VIII. of England. “From this marriage will spring Antichrist,” said others, remembering with terror that some nameless astrologer of the Middle Ages had foretold that Antichrist would be the issue of a perjured nun and an apostate monk. “How many Antichrists,” said Erasmus, with that covert but trenchant irony in which he was so great a master, “How many Antichrists must there be then in the world already. 8 What was Luther’s crime? He had obeyed an ordinance which God has instituted, and he had entered into a state which an apostle has pronounced “honorable in all.” But he did not heed the noise. It was his way of saying to Rome, “This is the obedience I give to your ordinances, and this is the awe in which I stand of your threatenings.” The rebuke thus tacitly given sank deep. It was another inexpiable offense, added to many former ones, for which, as Rome fondly believed, the hour of recompense was now drawing nigh. Even some of the disciples of the Reformation were scandalised at Luther’s marrying an ex-nun, so slow are men to cast off the trammels of ages.

With Catherine Bora there entered a new light into the dwelling of Luther.

To sweetness and modesty, she added a more than ordinary share of good sense. A genuine disciple of the Gospel, she became the faithful companion and help-meet of the Reformer in all the labors and trials of his subsequent life. From the inner circle of that serenity and peace which her presence diffused around him, he looked forth upon a raging world which was continually seeking to destroy him, and which marvelled that the Reformer did not sink, not seeing the Hand that turned aside the blows which were being ceaselessly aimed at him.

CHAPTER - DIETAT SPIRES, 1526, AND LEAGUE AGAINST THE EMPEROR.

A Storm—Rolls away from Wittenberg—Clement Hopes to Restore the Mediaeval Papal Glories—Forms a League against the Emperor— Changes of the Wind—Charles turns to Wittenberg—Diet at Spires— Spirit of the Lutheran Princes—Duke John—Landgrave Philip—“The Word of the Lord endureth for ever”—Protestant Sermons—City Churches Deserted—The Diet takes the Road to Wittenberg—The Free Towns—The Reforms Demanded—Popish Party Discouraged—The Emperor’s Letter from Seville—Consternation.

PICTURE: The Reformed Princes on their Way to the Diet at Spires THE storm had been coming onward for some time. The emperor and the Pope, at the head of the confederate kings and subservient princes of the Empire, were advancing against the Reformation, to strike once and for all.

Events fell out in the Divine appointment that seemed to pave the way of the assailing host, and make their victory sure. Frederick, who till now had stood between Luther and the mailed hand of Charles, was at that moment borne to the tomb. It seemed as if the crusades of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were about to be repeated, and that the Protestantism of the sixteenth century was to be extinguished in a tempest of horrors, similar to that which had swept away the Albigensian confessors.

However, despite the terrible portents now visible in every quarter of the sky, the confidence of Luther that all would yet go well was not to be disappointed. Just as the tempest seemed about to burst over Wittenberg, to the amazement of all men, it rolled away, and discharged itself with terrific violence on Rome. Let us see how this came about.

Of the potentates with whom Charles had contracted alliance, or with whom he was on terms of friendship, the one he could most thoroughly depend on, one would have thought, was the Pope. In the affair the emperor had now in hand, the interest and policy of Charles and of Clement were undoubtedly identical. On what could the Pope rely for deliverance from that host of heretics that Germany was sending forth, but on the sword of Charles V.? Yet at this moment the Pope suddenly turned against the emperor, and, as if smitten with infatuation, wrecked the expedition that Charles meditated for the triumph of Rome and the humiliation of Wittenberg just as the emperor was on the point of beginning it. This was passing strange, What motive led the Pope to adopt a policy so suicidal? That which misled Clement was his dream of restoring the lost glories of the Popedom, and making it what it had been under Gregory VII. We have already pointed out the change effected in the European system by the wars of the fifteenth century, and how much that change contributed to pave the way for the advent of Protestantism. The Papacy was lowered and monarchy was lifted up; but the Popes long cherished the hope that the change was only temporary, that Christendom would return to its former state—the true one they deemed it—and that all the crowns of Europe would be once more under the tiara. Therefore, though Clement was pleased to see the advancement of Charles V. so far as it enabled him to serve the Roman See, he had no wish to see him at the summit. The Pope was especially jealous of the Spanish power in Italy.

Charles already possessed Naples; the victory of Pavia had given him a firm footing in Lombardy. Thus, both in the north and in the south of the Italian peninsula, the Spanish power hemmed in the Pontiff. Clement aspired to erect Italy into an independent kingdom, and from Rome, its old capital, govern it as its temporal monarch, while he swayed his scepter over all Christendom as its spiritual chief. The hour was favorable, he thought, for the realization of this fine project. There was a party of literary men in Florence and Rome who were full of the idea of restoring Italy to her old place among the kingdoms. This idea was the result of the literary and artistic progress of the Italians during the half-century which had just elapsed; 1 and the result enables us to compare the relative forces of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The first engendered in the bosoms of the Italians a burning detestation of the yoke of their foreign masters, but left them entirely without power to free themselves. The last brought both the love of liberty and the power of achieving it.

Knowing this feeling on the part of his countrymen, Pope Clement, thinking the hour was come for restoring to the Papacy its mediaeval glories, opened negotiations with Louisa of Savoy, who administered the government of France during the captivity of her son, and afterwards with Francis I. himself when he had recovered his liberty. He corresponded with the King of England, who favored the project; with Venice, with Milan, with the Republic of Florence. And all these parties, moved by fear of the overgrown power of the emperor, were willing to enter into a league with the Pope against Charles V. This, known as the “Holy League,” was subscribed at Cognac, and the King of England was put at the head of it. Thus suddenly did the change come. Blind to everything beyond his immediate object—to the risks of war, to the power of his opponent, and to the diversion he was creating in favor of Wittenberg—the Pope, without loss of time, sent his army into the Duchy of Milan, to begin operations against the Spaniards. While hostilities are pending in the north of Italy, let us turn our eyes to Germany. The Diet, which, as we have already said, had been summoned by Charles to meet at Augsburg, was at this moment assembled at Spires It had met at Augsburg, agreeably to the imperial command, in November, 1525, but it was so thinly attended that it adjourned to midsummer next year, to be held at Spires, where we now find it. It had been convoked in order to lay the train for the execution of the Edict of Worms, and the suppression of Protestantism. But between the issuing of the summons and meeting of the assembly the politics of Europe had entirely changed.

When the emperor’s edict passed out of the gates of the Alcazar of Toledo the wind was setting full toward the Vatican, the Pope was the emperor’s staunchest ally, and was preparing to place the imperial crown on his head; but since then the wind had suddenly veered round toward the opposite quarter, and Charles must turn with it—he must play off Luther against Clement. This complete reversal of the political situation was as yet unknown in Germany, or but vaguely surmised.

The Diet assembled at Spires on the. 25th of June, 1526, and all the electoral princes were present, except the Prince of Brandenburg. 4 The Reformed princes were in strong muster, and in high spirits. The fulminations from Spain had not terrified them. Their courage might be read in the gallantry of their bearing as they rode along to Spires, at the head of their armed retainers, with the five significant letters blazoned on their banners, and shown also on their escutcheons hung out on the front of their hotels, and even embroidered on the liveries of their servants,V. D.

M. I. AE., that is, Verbum Domini manet in AEternum (“ The word of the Lord endureth for ever”). Theirs was not the crestfallen air of men who were going to show cause why they dared be Lutherans when it was the will of the emperor that they should be Romanists. Charles had thundered against them in his ban; they had given their reply in the motto which they had written upon their standards, “The Word of God.” Under this sign would they conquer. Their great opponent was advancing against them at the head of kingdoms and armies; but the princes lifted their eyes to the motto on their ensigns, and took courage: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.” Whoever in the sixteenth century would assert rank and challenge influence, must display a corresponding magnificence. John, Duke of Saxony, entered Spires with a retinue of 700 horsemen. The splendor of his style of living far exceeded that of the other electors, ecclesiastical and lay, and gained for him the place of first prince of the Empire. The next after Duke John to figure at the Diet was Phllip, Landgrave of Hesse. His wealth did not enable him to maintain so numerous a retinue as Duke John, but his gallant bearing, ready address, and skill in theological discussion gave him a grand position. Bishops he did not fear to encounter in debate.

His arsenal was the Bible, and so adroit was he in the use of his weapons, that his antagonist, whether priest or layman, was sure to come off only second best. Both Duke John and Landgrave Philip understood the crisis that had arrived, and resolved that nothing should be wanting on their part to ward off the dangers that from so many quarters, and in a combination so formidable, threatened at this hour the Protestant cause.

Their first demand on arriving at Spires was for a church in which the Gospel might be preached. The Bishop of Spires stood aghast at the request. Did the princes know what they asked? Was not Lutheranism under the ban of the Empire? Had not the Diet been assembled to suppress it, and uphold the old religion? If then he should open a Lutheran conventicle in the city, and set up a Lutheran pulpit in the midst of the Diet, what would be thought of his conduct at Rome? No? while the Church’s oil was upon him he would listen to no such proposal. Well, replied the princes in effect, if a church cannot be had, the Gospel will lose none of its power by being preached outside cathedral. The elector and landgrave, who had brought their chaplains with them, opened their hotels for worship. 7 On one Sunday, it is said, as many as 8,000 assembled to the Protestant sermon. While the saloons of the princes were thronged, the city churches were deserted. If we except Ferdinand and the Catholic princes, who thought it incumbent upon them to countenance the old worship, scarce in nave or aisle was there worshipper to be seen. The priests were left alone at the foot of the altars. The tracts of Luther, freely distributed in Spires, helped too to make the popular tide set yet more strongly in the Reformed direction; and the public feeling, so unequivocally declared, reacted on the Diet.

The Reformed princes and their friends were never seen at mass; and on the Church’s fast-days, as on other days, meat appeared at their tables.

Perhaps they were a little too ostentatious in letting it be known that they gave no obedience to the ordinance od “Forbidden meats.” It was not necessary on “magro day, as the Italians call it, to carry smoking joints to Lutheran tables in full sight of Romanist assemblies engaged in their devotions, in order to show their Protestantism. 8 They took other and more commendable methods to distinguish between themselves and the adherents of the old creed. They strictly charged their attendants to an orderly and obliging behavior; they commanded them to eschew taverns and gaming-tables, and generally to keep aloof from the roystering and disorderly company which the Diets of the Empire commonly drew into the cities where they were held. 9 Their preachers proclaimed the doctrines, and their followers exhibited the fruits of Lutheranism. Thus all undesignedly a powerful Protestant propaganda was established in Spires.

The leaven was spreading in the population.

Meanwhile the Diet was proceeding with its business. Ferdinand of Austria it was suspected had very precise instructions from his brother, the emperor, touching the measures he wished the Diet to adopt. But Ferdinand, before delivering them, waited to see how the Diet would incline. If it should hold the straight road, so unmistakably traced out; in the Edict of Worms, he would be spared the necessity of delivering the harsh message with which he had been charged; but if the Diet should stray in the direction of Wittenberg, then he would make known the emperor’s commands.

The Diet had not gone far till it was evident that it had left the road in which Ferdinand and the emperor desired that it should walk. Not only did it not execute the Edict of Worms—declaring this to be impossible, and that if the emperor were on the spot he too would be of this mind—but it threw on Charles the blame of the civil strife which had lately raged in Germany, by so despotically forbidding in the Decree of Burgos the assembling of the Diet at Spires, as agreed on at Nuremberg, and so leaving the wounds of Germany to fester, till they issued in “seditions and a bloody civil war.” It demanded, moreover, the speedy convocation of a general or national council to redress the public grievances. In these demands we trace the rising influence of the free towns in the Diet. The lay element was asserting itself, and challenging the sole right of the priests to settle ecclesiastical affairs. The Popish members, perceiving how the tide was setting, became discouraged. Nor was this all. A paper was given in (August 4th) to the princes by the representatives of several of the cities of Germany, proposing other changes in opposition to the known will and policy of the emperor. In this paper the cities complained that poor men were saddled with Mendicant friars, who “wheedled them, and ate the bread out of their mouths; nor was that all—many times they hooked in inheritances and most ample legacies.” The cities demanded that a stop should be put to the multiplication of these fraternities; that when any of the friars died their places should not be filled by new members; that those among them who were willing to embrace another calling should have a small annual pension allowed them; and that the rest of their revenues should be brought into the public treasury. It was not reasonable, they further maintained, that the clergy should be exempt from all public burdens. That privilege had been granted them of old by the bounty of kings; but then they were “few in number” and “low in fortune;” now they were both numerous and rich.

The exemption was the more invidious that the clergy shared equally with others in the advantages for which money and taxes were levied. They complained, moreover, of the great number of holidays. The severe penalties which forbade useful labor on these days did not shut out temptations to vice and crime, and these periods of compulsory idleness were as unfavorable to the practice of virtue as to the habit of industry.

They prayed, moreover, that the law touching forbidden meats should be abolished, and that all men should be left at liberty on the head of ceremonies till such time as a General Council should assemble, and that meanwhile no obstruction should be offered to the preaching of the Gospel. It was now that the storm really burst. Seeing the Diet treading the road that led to Wittenberg, and fearing that, should he longer delay, it would arrive there, Ferdinand drew forth from its repose in the recesses of his cabinet the emperor’s letter, and read it to the deputies. The letter was dated Seville, March 26, 1526. 12 Charles had snatched a moment’s leisure in the midst of his marriage festivities to make known his will on the religious question, in prospect of the meeting of the Diet. The emperor informed the princes that he was about to proceed to Rome to be crowned; that he would consult with the Pope touching the calling of a General Council; that meanwhile he “willed and commanded that they should decree nothing contrary to the ancient customs, canons, and ceremonies of the Church, and that all things should be ordered within his dominions according to the form and tenor of the Edict of Worms.” 13 This was the Edict of Worms over again. It meted out to the disciples of Protestantism chains, prisons, and stakes.

The first moments were those of consternation. The check was the more severe that it came at a time when the hopes of the Protestants were high.

Landgrave Philip was triumphing in the debate; the free towns were raising their voices; the Popish section of the Diet was maintaining a languid fight; all Germany seemed on the point of being carried over to the Lutheran side; when, all at once, the Protestants were brought up before the powerful man who, as the conqueror of Pavia, had humbled the King of France, and placed himself at the summit of Europe. In his letter they heard the first tramp of his legions advancing to overwhelm them. Verily they had need to lift their eyes again to their motto, and draw fresh courage from it— “The Word of the Lord endureth for ever.”

CHAPTER - THE SACK OF ROME.

A Great Crisis—Deliverance Dawns—Tidings of Feud between the Pope and Emperor—Political Situation Reversed—Edict of Worms Suspended—Legal Settlement of Toleration in Germany—The Tempest takes the Direction of Rome— Charles’s Letter to Clement VII.—An Army Raised in Germany for the Emperor’s Assistance — Freundsberg—The German Troops Cross the Alps—Junction with the Spanish General—United Host March on Rome—The City Taken—Sack of Rome—Pillage and Slaughter—Rome never Retrieves the Blow.

PICTURE: The Cathedral of Spires PICTURE: The Castle of St. Angelo Rome WHAT were the Protestant princes to do? On every hand terrible dangers threatened their cause. The victory of Pavia, as we have already said, had placed Charles at the head of Christendom: what now should prevent his giving effect to the Edict of Worms? It had hung, like a naked sword, above Protestantism these five years, threatening every moment to descend and crush it. Its author was now all-powerful: what should hinder his snapping the thread that held it from falling? He was on his way to concert measures to that effect with the Pope. In Germany, the Ratisbon League was busy extirpating Lutheranism within its territories. Frederick was in his grave.

From the Kings of England and France no aid was to be expected. The Protestants were hemmed in on every hand.

It was at that hour that a strange rumor reached their ears. The emperor and the Pope were, it was whispered, at strife! The news was hardly credible. At length came detailed accounts of the league that Clement VII. had formed against the emperor, with the King of England at its head. The Protestants, when these tidings reached them, thought they saw a pathway beginning to open through the midst of tremendous dangers. But a little before, they had felt as the Israelites did on the shore of the Red Sea, with the precipitous cliffs of Aba Deraj on their right, the advancing war- chariots and horsemen of Pharaoh on their left, while behind them rose the peaks of Atakah, and in front rolled the waters of the broad, deep, and impassable gulf No escape was left the terror-stricken Israelites, save through the plain of Badiya, which opened in their rear, and led back into the former house of their bondage. So of the men who were now essaying to flee from a gloomier prison, and a more debasing as well as more lengthened bondage than that of the Israelites in Egypt, “they” were “entangled in the land, the wilderness” had “shut them in.” Behind them was the Ratisbon League; in front were the emperor and Pope, one in interest and policy, as the Protestant princes believed. They had just had read to them the stern command of Charles to abolish no law, change no doctrine, and omit no rite of the Roman Church, and to proceed in accordance with the Edict of Worms; which was as much as to say, Unsheath your swords, and set about the instant and complete purgation of Germany from Luther and Lutheranism, under penalty of being yourselves visited with a like infliction by the arms of the Empire. How they were to escape from this dilemma, save by a return to the obedience of the Pope, they could not at that moment see. As they turned first to one hand, then to another, they could descry nothing but unscaleable cliffs, and fathomless abysses. At length deliverance appeared to dawn in the most unexpected quarter of all. They had never looked to Rome or to Spain, yet there it was that they began to see escape opening to them. The emperor and the Pope, they were told, were at variance: so then they were to march through the sundered camp of their enemies. With feelings of wonder and awe, not less lively than those of the Hebrew host when they saw the waves beginning to divide, and a pathway to open from shore to shore, did the Lutheran chiefs and their followers see the host of their foes, gathered in one mighty confederacy to overwhelm them, begin to draw apart, and ultimately form themselves into two opposing camps, leaving a pathway between, by which the little Protestant army, under their banner with its sacred emblazonry—“The Word of the Lord endureth for ever”— might march onwards to a place of safety. The influence that parted the hearts and councils of their enemies, and turned their arms against each other, they no more could see than the Israelites could see the Power that divided the waters and made them stand upright, but that the same Power was at work in the latter as in the former case they could not doubt. The Divine Hand has never been wanting to the Gospel and its friends, but seldom has its interposition been more manifest than at this crisis.

The emperor’s ukase from Seville, breathing death to Lutheranism, was nearly as much out of date and almost as little to be regarded as if it had been fulminated a century before. A single glance revealed to the Lutheran princes the mighty change which had taken place in affairs. Christendom was now in arms against the man who but a few months ago had stood at its summit; and, instead of girding himself to fight against Lutheranism for the Pope, Charles must now ask the aid of Lutheranism in the battle that he was girding himself to fight against the Pope and his confederate kings.

It was even whispered in the Diet that conciliatory instructions of later date had arrived from the emperor. 1 Ferdinand, it was said, was bidden in these later letters to draw toward Duke John and the other Lutheran princes, to cancel the penal clauses in the Edict of Worms, and to propose that the whole religious controversy should be referred to a General Council; but he feared, it was said, to make these instructions known, lest he should alienate the Popish members of the Diet.

Nor was it necessary he should divulge the new orders. The astounding news of the “League of Cognac,” that “most holy confederation” of which Clement VII. was the patron and promoter, had alone sufficed to sow distrust and dismay among the Popish members of the Diet. They knew that this strange league had “broken the bow” of the emperor, had weakened the hands of his friends in the Council; and that to press for the execution of the Edict of Worms would result only in damage to the man and the party in whose interests it had been framed.

In the altered relations of the emperor to the Papacy, the Popish section of the Diet—among the more prominent of whom were the Dukes of Brunswick and Pomerania, Prince George of Saxony, and the Dukes of Bavaria— dared not come to an open rupture with the Reformers. The peasant-war had just swept over Germany, leaving many parts of the Fatherland covered with ruins and corpses, and to begin a new conflict with the Lutheran princes, and the free and powerful cities which had espoused the cause of the Reformation, would be madness. Thus the storm passed away. Nay, the crisis resulted in great good to the Reformation. “A decree was made at length to this purpose,” says Sleidan, “that for establishing religion, and maintaining peace and quietness, it was necessary there should be a lawful General or Provincial Council of Germany held within a year; and, that no delay or impediment might intervene, that ambassadors should be sent to the emperor, to pray him that he would look upon the miserable and tumultuous state of the Empire, and come into Germany as soon as he could, and procure a Council. As to religion and the Edict of Worms,” continued the Diet—conferring by a simple expedient one of the greatest of blessings—” As to religion and the Edict of Worms, in the meanwhile till a General or National Council can be had, all shall so behave themselves in their several provinces as that they may be able to render an account of their doings both to God and the emperor” 2 — that is, every State was to be free to act in religion upon its own judgment.

Most historians have spoken of this as a great epoch. “The legal existence of the Protestant party in the Empire,” says Ranke, “is based on the Decree of Spires of 1526.” 3 “The Diet of 1526,” says D’Aubigne, “forms an important epoch in history: an ancient power, that of the Middle Ages, is shaken; a new power, that of modern times, is advancing; religious liberty boldly takes its stand in front of Romish despotism; a lay spirit prevails over the sacerdotal spirit.” 4 This edict was the first legal blow dealt at the supremacy and infallibility of Rome. It was the dawn of toleration in matters of conscience to nations: the same right had still to be extended to individuals. A mighty boon had been won. Campaigns have been fought for less blessings: the Reformers had obtained this without unsheathing a single sword.

But the storm did not disperse without first bursting. As the skies of Germany became clear those of Rome became overcast. The winter passed away in some trifling affairs between the Papal and the Spanish troops in Lombardy; but when the spring of 1527 opened, a war-cloud began to gather, and in due time it rolled down from the Alps, and passing on to the south, it discharged itself in terrible violence upon the city and chair of the Pontiff.

Before having recourse to arms against the “Holy Father,” who, contrary to all the probabilities of the case, and contrary also to his own interest, had conspired against his most devoted as well as most powerful son, the emperor made trial of his pen. In a letter of the 18th September, written in the gorgeous halls of the Alhambra, Charles reminded Clement VII. of the many services he had rendered him, for which, it appeared, he must now accept as payment the league formed against him at his instigation “Seeing,” said the emperor to the Pope, “God hath set us up as two great luminaries, let us endeavor that the world may be enlightened by us, and that no eclipse may happen by our dissensions. But,” continued the emperor, having recourse to what has always been the terror of Popes, “if you will needs go on like a warrior, I protest and appeal to a Council.” This letter was without effect in the Vatican, and these “two luminaries,” to use the emperor’s metaphor, instead of shedding light on the world began to scorch it with fire. The war was pushed forward.

The emperor had requested his brother Ferdinand to take command of the army destined to act against the Pope. Ferdinand, however, could not, at this crisis, be absent from Germany without great inconvenience, and accordingly he commissioned Freundsberg, the same valorous knight who, as we have related, addressed the words of encouragement to Luther when he entered the imperial hall at Worms, to raise troops for the emperor’s assistance, and lead them across the Alps. Freundsberg was a geunine lover of the Gospel, but the work he had now in hand was no evangelical service, and he set about it with the coolness, the business air, and the resolution of the old soldier. It was November (1526); the snows had already fallen on the Alps, making it doubly hazardous to climb their precipices and pass their summits. But such was the ardor of both general and army, that this host of 15,000 men in three days had crossed the mountains and joined the Constable of Bourbon, the emperor’s general, on the other side of them.

On effecting a junction, the combined German and Spanish army, which now amounted to 20,000, set out on their march on Rome. The German general carried with him a great iron chain, wherewith, as he told his soldiers, he intended to hang the Pope. Rome, however, he was never to see, a circumstance more to be regretted by the Romans than by the Germans; for the kindly though rough soldier would, had he lived, have restrained the wild licence of his army, which wrought such woes to all in the in fated city. Freundsberg fell sick and died by the way, but his soldiers pressed forward. On the evening of the 5th of May, the invaders first sighted, through a thin haze, those venerable walls, over which many a storm had lowered, but few more terrible than that now gathering around them. What a surprise to a city which, full of banquetings and songs and all manner of delights, lived carelessly, and never dreamt that war would approach it! Yet here were the spoilers at her gates. Next morning, under cover of a dense fog, the soldiers approached the walls, the scaling-ladders were fixed, and in a few hours the troops were masters of Rome. The Pope and the cardinals fled to the Castle of St. Angelo. A little while did the soldiers rest on their arms, till the Pope should come to terms. Clement, however, scouted the idea of surrender. He expected deliverance every moment from the arms of the Holy League. The patience of the troops was soon exhausted, and the sack began.

We cannot, even at this distance of time, relate the awful tragedy without a shudder. The Constable Bourbon had perished in the first assault, and the army was left without any leader powerful enough to restrain the indulgence of its passions and appetites. What a city to spoil! There was not at that era another such on earth. At its feet the ages had laid their gifts. Its beauty was perfect!Whatever was rare, curious, or precious in the world was gathered into it. It was ennobled by the priceless monuments of antiquity; it was enriched with the triumphs of recent genius and art; the glory lent it by the chisel of Michael Angelo, the pencil of Rafael, and the tastes and munificence of Leo X. was yet fresh upon it. It was full to overflowing with the riches of all Christendom, which for centuries had been flowing into it through a hundred avenues—dispensations, pardons, jubilees, pilgrimages, annats, palls, and contrivances innumerable. But the hour had now come to her “that spoiled and was not spoiled.” The hungry soldiers flung themselves upon the prey. In a twinkling there burst over the sacerdotal city a mingled tempest of greed and rage, of lust and bloodthirsty vengeance.

The pillage was unsparing as pitiless. The most secret places were broken open and ransacked. Even the torture was employed, in some cases upon prelates and princes of the Church, to make them disgorge their wealth.

Not only were the stores of the merchant, the bullion of the banker, and the hoards of the usurer plundered, the altars were robbed of their vessels, and the churches of their tapestry and votive offerings. The tombs were rifled, the relics of the canonized were spoiled, and the very corpses of the Popes were stripped of their rings and ornaments. The plunder was pried up in heaps in the market-places—gold and silver cups, jewels, sacks of coin, pyxes, rich vestments—and the articles were gambled for by the soldiers, who, with abundance of wine and meat at their command, made wassail in the midst of the stricken and bleeding city.

Blood, pillage, and grim pleasantries were strangely and hideously mixed.

Things and persons which the Romans accounted “holy,” the soldiery took delight in exposing to ridicule, mockery, and outrage. The Pontifical ceremonial was exhibited in mimic pomp. Camp-boys were arrayed in cope and stole and chasuble, as if they were going to consecrate. Bishops and cardinals —in some cases stripped nude, in others attired in fantastic dress—were mounted on asses and lean mules, their faces turned to the animal’s croupe, and led through the streets, while ironical cheers greeted the unwelcome dignity to which they had been promoted. The Pope’s robes and tiara were brought forth, and put upon a lansquenet, while others of the soldiers, donning the red hats and purple gowns of the cardinals, went through the form of a Pontifical election. The mockconclave, having traversed the city in the train of the pseudo-Pope, halted before the Castle of St. Angelo, and there they deposed Clement VII., and elected “Martin Luther” in his room. “Never,” says D’Aubigme, “had Pontiff been proclaimed with such perfect unanimity.”

The Spanish soldiers were more embittered against the ecclesiastics than the Germans were, and their animosity, instead of evaporating in grim humor and drollery, like that of their Tramontane comrades, took a practical and deadly turn. Not content with rifling their victims of their wealth, they made them in many cases pay the forfeit of their lives. Some Church dignitaries expired in their hands in the midst of cruel tortures.

They spared no age, no rank, no sex. “Most piteous,” says Guiciardini, “were the shrieks and lamentations of the women of Rome, and no less worthy of compassion the deplorable condition of nuns and novices, whom the soldiers drove along by troops out of their convents, that they might satiate their brutal lust... . Amid this female wail, were mingled the hoarser clamors and groans of unhappy men, whom the soldiers subjected to torture, partly to wrest from them unreasonable ransom, and partly to compel the disclosure of the goods which they had concealed.” The sack of Rome lasted ten days. “It was reported,” says Guiciardini, “that the booty taken might be estimated at a million of ducats; but the ransoms of the prisoners amounted to a far larger sum.” The number of victims is estimated at from 5,000 to 10,000. The population on whom this terrible calamity fell were, upon the testimony of their own historians, beyond measure emasculated by effeminacy and vice. Vettori describes them as “proud, avaricious, murderous, envious, luxurious, and hypocritical.” 7 There were then in Rome, says Ranke, “30,000 inhabitants capable of bearing arms. Many of these men had seen service.” But, though they wore arms by their side, there was neither bravery nor manhood in their breasts. Had they possessed a spark of courage, they might have stopped the enemy in his advance to their city, or chased him from their walls after he appeared.

This stroke fell on Rome in the very prime of her mediaeval glory. The magnificence then so suddenly and terribly smitten has never revived. A few days sufficed to wellnigh annihilate a splendor which centuries were needed to bring to perfection, and which the centuries that have since elapsed have not been able to restore.

CHAPTER - ORGANIZATION OF THE LUTHERAN CHURCH.

A Calm of Three Years—Luther Begins to Build—Christians, but no Christian Society—Old Foundations—Gospel Creates Christians— Christ their Center—Truth their Bond—Unity—Luther’s Theory of Priesthood—All True Christians Priests—Some Elected to Discharge its Functions—Difference between Romish Priesthood and Protestant Priesthood—Commission of Visitation—Its Work—Church Constitution of Saxony.

PICTURE: John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, surnamed “The Steadfast” PICTURE: Francis Lambert Preaching AFTER the storm there came a three years’ calm: not indeed to that world over which the Pope and the emperor presided. The Christendom that owned the sway of these two potentates continued still to be torn by intrigues and shaken by battles. It was a sea on which the stormy winds of ambition and war strove together. But the troubles of the political world brought peace to the Church. The Gospel had rest only so long as the arms of its enemies were turned against each other. The calm of three years from 1526 to 1529—now vouchsafed to that new world which was rising in the midst of the old, was diligently occupied in the important work of organising and upbuilding. From Wittenberg, the center of this new world, there proceeded a mighty plastic influence, which was daily enlarging its limits and multiplying its citizens. To that we must now turn.

The way was prepared for the erection of the new edifice by the demolition of the old. How this came about we have said in the preceding chapter. The emperor had convoked the Diet at Spires expressly and avowedly to construct a defense around the old and now tottering edifice of Rome, and to raze to its foundations the new building of Wittenberg by the execution of the Edict of Worms of 1521: but the bolt forged to crush Wittenberg fell on Rome. Before the Diet had well begun their deliberations, the political situation around the emperor had entirely changed. Western Europe, alarmed at the vast ambition of Charles, was confederate against him. He could not now execute the Edict of Worms, for fear of offending the Lutheran princes, on whom the League of Cognac compelled him to cast himself; and he could not repeal it, for fear of alienating from him the Popish princes. A middle path was devised, which tided over the emperor’s difficulty, and gave a three years’ liberty to the Church. The Diet decreed that, till a General Council should assemble, the question of religion should be an open one, and every State should be at liberty to act in it as it judged right. Thus the Diet, the assembling of which the friends of the Reformation had seen with alarm, and its enemies with triumph, seeing it was to ring the death-knell of Protestantism, achieved just the opposite result. It inflicted a blow which broke in pieces the theocratic sovereignty of Rome in the German States of the Empire, and cleared the ground for the building of a new spiritual temple.

Luther was quick to perceive the opportunity that had at length arrived.

The edict of 1526 sounded to him as a call to arise and build. When the Reformer came down from the Wartburg, where doubtless he had often meditated on these things, there was a Reformation, but no Reformed Church; there were Christians, but no visible Christian society. His next work must be to restore such. The fair fabric which apostolic hands had reared, and which primitive times had witnessed, had been cast down long since, and for ages had lain in ruins: it must be built up from its old foundations. The walls had fallen, but the foundations, he knew, were eternal, like those of the earth. On these old foundations, as still remaining in the Scriptures, Luther now began to build.

Hitherto the Reformer’s work had been to preach the Gospel. By the preaching of the Gospel, he had called into existence a number of believing men, scattered throughout the provinces and cities of Germany, who were already actually, though not as yet visibly, distinct from the world, and to whom there belonged a real, though not as yet an outward, unity. They were gathered by their faith round one living center, even Christ; and they were knit by a great spiritual bond, namely, the truth, to one another. But the principle of union in the heart of each of these believing men must work itself into an outward unity—a unity visible to the world. Unless it does so, the inward principle will languish and die—not, indeed, in those hearts in which it already exists, but in the world: it will fail to propagate itself. These Christians must be gathered into a family, and built up into a kingdom—a holy and spiritual kingdom.

The first necessity in the organization of the Church—the work to which Luther now put his hand—was an order of men, by whatever names called—priests, presbyters, or bishops—to preach and to dispense the Sacraments. Cut off from Rome—the sole fountain, as she held herself to be, of sacred offices and graces—how did the Reformer proceed in the reconstitution of the ministry? He assumed that functions are lodged inalienably in the Church, or company of believing men, or brotherhood of priests; for he steadfastly held to the priesthood of all believers. The express object for which the Church existed, he reasoned, was to spread salvation over the earth. How does she do this? She does it by the preaching of the Gospel and the dispensation of Sacraments. It is therefore the Church’s duty to preach and to dispense the Sacraments. But duty, Luther reasoned, implies right and function. That function is the common possession of the Church—of all believers. But it is not to be exercised, in point of fact, by all the Church’s members; it is to be exercised by some only. How are these some, then, to be chosen? Are they to enter upon the exercise of this function at their own pleasure—simply self-appointed?

No; for what is the function of all cannot be specially exercised by any, save with the consent and election of the rest. The call or invitation of these others—the congregation, that is—constituted the right of the individual to discharge the office of “minister of the Word;” for so did the Reformer prefer to style those who were set apart in the Church to preach the Gospel and dispense the Sacraments. “In cases of necessity,” says he, “all Christians may exercise all the functions of the clergy, but order requires the devolving of the office upon particular persons.” 1 An immediate Divine call was not required to give one a right to exercise office in the Church: the call of God came through the instrumentality of man.

Thus did Luther constitute the ministry. Till this had been done, the ministry could not have that legitimate part which belongs to it in the appointing of those who are to bear office in the Church. The clergy of the Lutheran Church stood at the opposite pole from the clergy of the Roman Church. The former were democratic in their origin; the latter were monarchical. The former sprang from the people, by whom they were chosen, although that choice was viewed as being indirectly the call of God, who would accompany it with the gifts and graces necessary for the office; the latter were appointed by a sacerdotal monarch, and replenished for their functions by Sacramental ordination. The former differed in no essential point from the other members of the Church; the latter were a hierarchy, they formed a distinct order, inasmuch as they were possessed of exclusive qualities and powers. The ministrations of the former were effectual solely by faith in those who received them, and the working of the Spirit which accompanied them. Very different was it in the case of the Roman clergy; their ministrations, mainly sacrificial, were effectual by reason of the inherent efficacy of the act, and the official virtue of the man who performed it. Wherever there is a line of sacramentally ordained men, there and there only is the Church, said Rome. Wherever the Word is faithfully preached, and the Sacraments purely administered, there is the Church, said the Reformation.

In providing for her order, the Church did not surrender her freedom. The power with which she clothed those whom she elected to office was not autocratic, but ministerial: those who held that power were the Church’s servants, not her lords. Nor did the Church corporate put that power beyond her own reach: she had not parted with it once for all so that she should be required to yield a passive or helpless submission to her own ministers. That power was still hers—hers to be used for her edification— hers to be recalled if abused or turned to her destruction. It never can cease to be the Church’s duty to preach the Gospel and administer the Sacraments. No circumstances, no formality, no claim of office can ever relieve her from that obligation. But this implies that she has ever the right of calling to account or deposing from office those who violate the tacit condition of their appointment, and defeat its great end. Without this the Church would have no power of reforming herself; once corrupt, her cure would be hopeless; once enslaved, her bondage would be eternal.

From the consideration of these principles Luther advanced to the actual work of construction. He called the princes to his aid as his fellow-laborers in this matter. This was a departure in some measure from his theory, for undoubtedly that theory, legitimately applied, would have permitted none to take part in ecclesiastical arrangements and appointments save those who were members of the Church. But Luther had not thought deeply on the question touching the limits of the respective provinces of Church and State, or on how far the civil authority may go in enacting ecclesiastical arrangements, and planting a country with the ordinances of the Gospel.

No one in that day had very clear or decided views on this point. Luther, in committing the organising of the Church so largely into the hands of the princes, yielded to a necessity of the times. Besides, it is to be borne in mind that the princes were, in a sense, members of the Church; that they were not less prominent by their religious intelligence and zeal than by their official position, and that if Zwingli, who had more stringent opinions on the point of limiting Church action to Church agencies than Luther, made the Council of Two Hundred the representative of the Church in Zurich, the latter might be held excusable in making the princes the representative of the Church in Germany, more especially when so many of the common people were as yet too ignorant or too indifferent to take part in the matter.

On the 22nd October, 1526, Luther moved the Elector John of Saxony to issue a commission of visitation of his dominions, in order to the reinstitution of the Church, that of Rome being now abolished. Authorized by the elector, four commissioners began the work of Church visitation.

Two were empowered to inquire into the temporalities of the Church, and two into her ecclesisstical condition, touching schools, doctrine, pastors.

The paper of instructions, or plan according to which the Church in the Electorate of Saxony was to be reinstituted, was drawn up by Melancthon.

Luther, Melancthon, Spalatin, and Thuring were the four chief commissioners, to each of whom colleagues, lay and clerical, were attached.

To Luther was assigned the electorate; the others visited the provinces of Altenburg, Thuringia, and Franconia Much ignorance, many errors and mistakes, innumerable abuses and anomalies did the visitation bring to light. The Augean stable into which the Papacy had converted Germany, not less than the rest of Christendom, was not to be cleansed in a day. All that could be done was to make a beginning, and even that required infinite tact and firmness, great wisdom and faith. From the living waters of the sanctuary only could a real purification be looked for, and the care of the visitors was to open channels, or remove obstructions, that this cleansing current might freely pervade the land.

Ministers were chosen, consistories were appointed, ignorant and immoral pastors were removed, but provided for. In some cases priests were met with who were trying to serve both Rome and the Reformation. In one church they had a pulpit from which they preached the doctrines of free grace, in another an altar at which they used to say mass. The visitors put an end to such dualisms. The doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers did not comport, Luther thought, with a difference of grade among the ministers of the Gospel, but the pastors of the greater cities were appointed, under the title of superintendents, to supervise the others, and to watch over both congregations and schools.

The one great want everywhere, Luther found to be want of knowledge.

He set himself to remedy the deficiency by compiling popular manuals of the Reformed doctrine, and by issuing plain instructions to the preachers to qualify them more fully for teaching their frocks. He was at pains, especially, to show them the indissoluble link between the doctrine of a free justification and holiness of life. His “Larger and Smaller Catechisms,” which he published at this time, were among the most valuable fruits of the Church visitation. By spreading widely the truth they did much to root the Reformation among the people, and to rear a bulwark against the return of Popery.

Armed with the authority of the elector, the visitors suppressed the convents; the inmates were restored to society, the buildings were converted into schools and hospitals, and the property was divided between the maintenance of public worship and national uses. Ministers were encouraged to marry, and their families became centers of moral and intellectual life throughout the Fatherland.

The plan of Church reform, as drawn by Melancthon, was a retrogression.

As he wrote, he saw on the one hand the fanatics, on the other a possible re-approachment, at a future day, to Rome, and he framed his instructions in a conservative spirit. The antagonistic points in the Reformation doctrine he discreetly veiled; and as regarded the worship of the Church, he aimed at conserving as much and altering as little as possible. 3 Some called this moderation, others termed it trimming; the Romanists thought that the Reformation troops had begun their march back; the Wittenbergers were not without a suspicion of treachery. Luther would have gone further; for he grasped too thoroughly the radical difference between Rome and Wittenberg to believe that these two would ever again be one; but when he reflected on the sincerity of Melancthon, and his honest desire to guard the Reformation on all sides, he was content.

So far as the forms of worship and the aspect of the churches were concerned, the change resulting from this visitation was not of a marked kind. The Latin liturgy was retained, with a mixture of Lutheran hymns. The altar still stood, though now termed the table; the same toleration was vouchsafed the images, which continued to occupy their niches; vestments and lighted tapers were still made use of, especially in the rural churches. The great towns, such as Nuremberg, Ulm, Strasburg, and others, purged their temples of a machinery more necessary in the histrionic worship of Rome than in that of the Reformation. “There is no evil in these things,” 4 said Melancthon, “they will do no harm to the worshipper,” but the soundness of his inference is open to question. With all these drawbacks this visitation resulted in great good. The organisation now given the Church permitted a combination of her forces. She could henceforth more effectually resist the attacks of Rome. Besides, at the center of this organization was placed the preaching of the Word as the main instrumentality. That great light shone apace, and the tolerated superstitions faded away. A new face began to appear on Germany.

On the model of the Church of Saxony, were the Churches of the other German States re-constituted. Franconia, Luneburg, East Friesland, Schleswig and Holstein, Silesia, and Prussia received Reformed constitutions by the joint action of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities.

The same course was pursued in many of the principal cities of the German Empire. Their inhabitants had received the Reformation with open arms, and were eager to abolish all the traces of Romish domination. The more intelligent and free the city, the more thoroughly was this Reformation carried out. Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Strasburg, Brunswick, Hamburg, Bremen, Magdeburg, and others placed themselves in the list of the Reformed cities, without even availing themselves of the permission given them by Melancthon of halting at a middle stage in this Reformation. We have the torch of the Bible, said they, in our churches, and have no need of the light of a taper.

CHAPTER - CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH OF HESSE.

Francis Lambert—Quits his Monastery at Avignon—Comes to Zurich— Goes on to Germany—Luther Recommends him to Landgrave Philip— Invited to frame a Constitution for the Church of Hesse—His Paradoxes—The Priest’s Commentary—Discussion at Homburg—The Hessian Church constituted—Its Simplicity—Contrast to Romish Organization—General Ends gained by Visitation—Moderation of Luther—Monks and Nuns—Stipends of Protestant Pastors—Luther’s Instructions to them—Deplorable Ignorance of German Peasantry— Luther’s Smaller and Larger Catechisms—Their Effects.

PICTURE: View in Barcelona HESSE was an exception, not in lagging behind, but in going before the others. This principality enjoyed the labors of a remarkable man. Francis Lambert had read the writings of Luther in his cell at Avignon. His eyes opened to the light, and he fled. Mounted on an ass, his feet almost touching the ground, for he was tall as well as thin, wearing the grey gown of the Franciscans, gathered round his waist with the cord of the order, he traversed in this fashion the countries of Switzerland and Germany, preaching by the way, till at last he reached Wittenberg, and presented himself before Luther.

Charmed with the decision of his character and the clearness of his knowledge, the Reformer brought the Franciscan under the notice of Philip of Hesse. Between the thorough-going ex-monk and the chivalrous and resolute landgrave, there were not a few points of similarity fitted to cement them in a common action for the good of the Church. Francis was invited by the landgrave to frame a constitution for the Churches of Hesse.

Nothing loth, Lambert set to work, and in one hundred and fifty-eight “Paradoxes” produced a basis broad enough to permit of every member exercising his influence in the government of the Church.

We are amazed to find these propositions coming out of a French cell. The monk verily must have studied other books than his breviary. What a sudden illumination was it that dispelled the darkness around the disciples of the sixteenth century! Passing, in respect of their spiritual knowledge, from night to noon-day, without an intervening twilight, what a contrast do they present to nearly all those who in after-days left the Romish Communion to enroll themselves in the Protestant ranks! Were the intellects of the men of that age more penetrating or was the Spirit more largely given? But to pass on to the propositions of the ex-monk.

Conforming to a custom which had been an established one since the days of the Emperor Justinian, who published his Pandects in the Churches, Francis Lambert, of Avignon, nailed up his “Paradoxes” on the church doors of Hesse. Scarce were they exposed to the public gaze, when eager hands were stretched out to tear them down. Not so, however, for others and friendly ones are uplifted to defend them from desecration. “Let them be read,” say several voices. A young priest fetches a stool—mounts it; the crowd keep silence, and the priest reads aloud. “All that is deformed ought to be reformed.” So ran the first Paradox. It needed, thinks Boniface Dornemann, the priest who acted as reader, no runagate monk, no “spirit from the vasty depth” of Lutheranism to tell us this. “The Word of God is the rule of all true Reformation,” says Paradox second. That may be granted as part of the truth, thinks priest Dornemann, but it looks askance on tradition and on the infallibility of the Church. Still, with a Council to interpret the Bible, it may pass.

The crowd listens and he reads Paradox the third. “It belongs to the Church to judge on matters of faith.” Now the ex-monk has found the right road, doubtless thinks Dornemann, and bids fair to follow it. The Church is the judge. “The Church is the congregation of those who are united by the same spirit, the same faith, the same God, the same Mediator, the same Word, by which alone they are governed.” So runs Paradox the fourth. A dangerous leap! thinks the priest; the ex-monk clears tradition and the Fathers at a bound. He will have some difficulty in finding his way back to the orthodox path.

The priest proceeds to Paradox fifth. “The Word is the true key. The kingdom of heaven is open to him who believes the Word, and shut against him who believes it not. Whoever, therefore, truly possesses the power of the Word of God, has the power of the keys.” The ex-monk, thinks Dornemann, upsets the Pope’s throne in the little clause that gives right to the Word alone to govern. “Since the priesthood of the law has been abolished,” says the sixth proposition, “Christ is the only immortal and eternal Priest; and he does not, like men, need a successor.” There goes the whole hierarchy of priests.

Not an altar, not a mass in all Christendom that this proposition does not sweep away. Tradition, Councils, Popes, and now priests, all are gone, and what is left in their room? Let us read proposition seventh. “All Christians, since the commencement of the Church, have been and are participators in Christ’s priesthood.” The monk’s Paradoxes are opening the flood-gates to drown the Church and world in a torrent of democracy. At that moment the stool was pulled from under the feet of the priest, and, tumbling in the dust, his public reading was suddenly brought to an end.

We have heard enough, however; we see the ground plan of the spiritual temple; the basis is broad enough to sustain a very lofty structure. Not a select few only, but all believers, are to be built as living stones into this “holy house.” With the ex-Franciscan of Avignon, as with the ex- Augustinian of Wittenberg, the corner-stone of the Church’s organization is the “universal priesthood” of believers.

This was a catholicity of which that Church which claims catholicity as her exclusive possession knew nothing. The Church of Rome had lodged all priesthood primarily in one man, St. Peter—that is, in the Pope—and only a select few, who were linked to him by a mysterious chain, were permitted to share in it. What was the consequence? Why, this, that one part of the Church was dependent upon another part for salvation; and instead of a heavenly society, all whose members were enfranchised inan equal privilege and a common dignity, and all of whom were engaged in offering the same spiritual sacrifices of praise and obedience, the Church was parted into two great classes; there were the oligarchs and there were the serfs; the first were holy, the others were profane; the first monopolized all blessings, and the others were their debtors for such gifts as they chose to dole out to them.

The two ex-monks, Luther and Lambert, put an end to this state of things.

They abolished the one priest, plucking from his brow his impious mitre, and from his hands his blasphemous sacrifice, and they put the one Eternal Priest in heaven in his room. Instead of the hierarchy whose reservoir of power was on the Seven Hills, whence it was conveyed downward through a mystic chain that linked all other priests to the Pope, much as the cable conveys the electric spark from continent to continent, they restored the universal priesthood of believers. Their fountain of power is in heaven; faith like a chain links them to it; the Holy Spirit is the oil with which they are anointed; and the sacrifices they present are not those of expiation, which has been accomplished once for all by the Eternal Priest, but of hearts purified by faith, and lives which the same divine grace makes fruitful in holiness. This was a great revolution. An ancient and established order was abolished; an entirely different one was introduced. Who gave them authority to make this change? That same apostle, they answered, which the Church of Rome had made her chief and corner-stone. St. Peter, said the Church of Rome, is the one priest: he is the reservoir of all priesthood. But St. Peter himself had taught a very different doctrine; speaking, not through his successor at Rome, but in his own person, and addressing all believers, he had said, “Ye are a royal priesthood.” So then that apostle, whom Romanists represented as concentrating the whole priestly function in himself, had made the most unreserved and universal distribution of it among the members of the Church.

In this passage we hear a Divine voice speaking, and calling into being another society than a merely natural one. We behold the Church coming into existence, and the same Word that summons her forth invests her in her powers and functions. In her cradle she is pronounced to be “royal” and “holy.” Her charter includes two powers, the power of spiritual government and the power of holy service. These are lodged in the whole body of believers, but the exercise of them is not the right of all, but the right only of the fittest, whom the rest are to call to preside over them in the exercise of powers which are not theirs, but the property of the whole body. Such were the conclusions of Luther and the ex-Franciscan of Avignon; and the latter now proceeded to give effect to these general principles in the organization of the Church of Hesse.

But first he must submit his propositions to the authorities ecclesiastical and civil of Hesse, and if possible obtain their acceptance of them. The Landgrave Philip issued his summons, and on the 21st October knights and counts, prelates and pastors, with deputies from the towns, assembled in the Church of Homburg, to discuss the propositions of Lambert. The Romish party vehemently assailed the Paradoxes; with equal vigor Lambert defended them. His eloquence silenced every opponent, and after three days’ discussion his propositions were carried, and the Churches of Hesse constituted in accordance therewith.

The Church constitution of Hesse is the first to which the Reformation gave birth; it was framed in the hope that it might be a model to others, and it differs in some important points from all of subsequent enactment in Germany. It took its origin exclusively from the Church; its authority was derived from the same quarter; for in its enactment mention was made neither of State nor of landgrave, and it was worked by a Church agency.

Every member of the Church, of competent learning and piety, was eligible to the ministerial office; each congregation was to choose its own pastor.

The pastors were all equal; they were to be ordained by the laying on of the hands of three others; they were to meet with their congregations every Sabbath for the exercise of discipline; and an annual synod was to supervise the whole body. The constitution of the Hessian Church very closely resembled that which was afterwards adopted in Switzerland and Scotland. 2 But it was hardly to be expected that it should retain its popular vigor in the midst of Churches constituted on the Institutions of Melancthon; the State gradually encroached upon its liberties, and in it was remodelled upon the principles of the Church constitutions of Saxony. Such were the labors that occupied the three years during which the winds were held that they should not blow on the young vine which was now beginning to stretch its boughs over Christendom.

This visitation marks a new epoch in the history of Protestantism.

Hitherto, the Reformation had been simply a principle, standing unembodied before its opponents, and fighting at great disadvantage against an established and organised system. It was no longer so. It was not less a spiritual principle than before, but it had now found a body in which to dwell, and through which to act. It could now wield all the appliances that organization gives for combining and directing its efforts, and making its presence seen and its power felt by men. This organization it did not borrow from tradition, or from the existing hierarchy, which bore a too close resemblance to that of the pagan temples, but from the pages of the New Testament, finding its models whence it had drawn its doctrines.

It was the purity of apostolic doctrine, equipped in the simplicity of apostolic organizaton. Thus it disposed of the claims of the Romish Church to antiquity by attesting itself as more ancient than it. But though ancient, it was not like Rome borne down by the corruptions and decrepitudes of age; it had the innate celestial vigor of the primitive Church whose representative it claimed to be. Young itself, it promised to bestow a second youth on the world.

Besides the main object of this visitation, which was the planting of churches, a number of subsidiary but still important ends were gained. We are struck, first of all, by the new light in which this visitation presents the character of the Reformer. Luther as a controversialist and Luther as an administrator seem two different men. In debate the Reformer sweeps the field with an impetuosity that clears his path of every obstruction, and with an indignation that scathes and burns up every sophist and every sophism which his logic has overturned. But when he goes forth on this tour of visitation we hardly know him. He clothes himself with considerateness, with tenderness, and even with pity. He is afraid of going too far, and in some cases he leaves it open to question whether he has gone far enough. He is calm—nay, cautious —treading softly lest unwittingly he should trample on a prejudice that is honestly entertained, or hurt the feelings of any weak brother, or do an act of injustice or severity to any one. The revenues of the abbeys and cathedrals he touches no further than to order that they shall contribute a yearly sum for the salaries of the parish ministers, and the support of the schools. Vacant benefices, of course, he appropriates; here no personal plea appeals to his commiseration. Obstinate Romanists find forbearance at his hands. There was a clause in the Visitation Act which, had he chosen to enforce it, would have enabled him to banish such from Saxony; but in several instances he pleads for them with the elector, representing that it would be wiser policy to let them alone, than to drive them into other countries, where their opportunities of mischief would be greater. 4 If indulgent to this class, he could not be other than beneficent to nuns and monks. He remembered that he had been a monk himself. Nuns, in many instances, were left in their convents, and old monks in their chimney- corners, with a sufficient maintenance for the rest of their lives. “Commended to God” was the phrase by which he designated this class, and which showed that he left to time and the teaching of the Spirit the dissolution of the conventual vow, and the casting-off of the monastic cowl. To expel the nun from her cell, and strip the monk of his frock, while the fetter remained on the soul, was to leave them captives still. It was a Higher who had been anointed to “proclaim liberty to the captive and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”

Not less considerate were his instructions to preachers. He counselled a moderate and wise course in the pulpit, befitting the exigencies of the age.

They were to go forth into the wilderness that Christendom had become with the doctrine of the Baptist, “Repent.” But in their preaching they were never to disjoin Repentance from Faith. These were two graces which worked together in a golden yoke; in vain would the former pour out her tears, unless the latter was near with her pardon. There was forgiveness, not in the confessor’s box, but in the throne of Christ, but it was only faith that could mount into the skies and bring it down.

In the pulpit they were to occupy themselves with the same truths which the apostles and early evangelists had preached; they were not to fear that the Gospel would lose its power; they “were not to fling stones at Romanism;” the true light would extinguish the false, as the day quenches the luminosity that putrid bodies wear in the darkness.

With the spiritual inability of the will they were to teach the moral freedom of the will; the spiritual incapacity which man has contracted by the Fall was not to be pleaded to the denial of his responsibility. Man can abstain, if he chooses, from lying, from theft, from murder, and from other sins, according to St. Paul’s declaration—“The Gentiles do by nature the things contained in the law.” Man can ask the power of God to cure the impotency of his will; but it was God, not the saints, that men were to supplicate. The pastors were further instructed to administer the Sacrament in both kinds, unless in some exceptional cases, and to inculcate the doctrine of the real presence.

In his tour, the Reformer was careful to examine the peasantry personally, to ascertain the exact state of their knowledge, and how to shape his instructions. One day, as Mathesius relates, he asked a peasant to repeat the Creed. “I believe in God Almighty—” began the peasant. “Stop,” said Luther. “What do you mean by ‘Almighty? ’” “I cannot tell,” replied the man. “Neither can I,” said Luther, “nor all the learned men in the world.

Only believe that God is thy dear and true Father, and knows, as the Allwise Lord, how to help thee, thy wife, and children, in time of need. That is enough.”

Two things this visitation brought to light. First, it showed how very general was the abandonment of the Romish doctrines and ceremonies throughout Saxony; and, secondly, how deplorable the ignorance into which the Church of Rome, despite her rich endowments, her numerous fraternities, and her array of clergy, had permitted the body of the common people to descend. Schools, preachers, the Bible, all withheld. She had made them “naked to their shame.” In some respects this made the work of Luther the easier. There was little that was solid to displace. There were no strong convictions to root up: crass ignorance had cleared the ground to his hand. In other respects, this made his work the more difficult; for all had to be built up from the foundations; the very first elements of Divine knowledge had to be instilled into the lower orders. With the higher ranks things were not so bad; with them Lutheranism was more a reality—a distinctly apprehended system of truth—than it had yet come to be with the classes below them. In the Altenburg district of the Saxon Electorate, only one nobleman now adhered to the Church of Rome. In the city the Gospel had been preached seven years, and now there were hardly ten men to be found in it who adhered to the Roman Church. 6 Of one hundred parishes, only four continued to celebrate mass. 7 The priests, abandoning the concubinage in which the Pope had allowed them to live, contracted marriage, in the majority of instances, with those with whom they had previously maintained relations of a less honorable kind. 8 Over against these gratifying proofs of the progress of the movement, others of a less satisfactory character had to be placed. The Lutheranism which had superseded the Romanian was, in many instances, interpreted to mean simply a release from the obligation to pay ecclesiastical dues, and to give attendance on church ceremonies. Nor does one wonder that the peasants should so have regarded it, when one recalls the spectacles of oppression which met the eyes of the visitors in their progress: fields abandoned and houses deserted from the pressure of the religious imposts. 9 From a people so completely fleeced, and whose ignorance was as great as their penury, the Protestant pastor could expect only inadequate and precarious support. The ministers eked out the miserable contributions of their flocks by cultivating each his little patch of land. While serving their Master in straits, if not in poverty, they saw without a murmur the bulk of the wealthy Popish foundations grasped by the barons, or used by the canons and other ecclesiastics who chose still to remain within the pale of the Roman Church. These hardships, they knew, were the inevitable attendants of the great transition now being effected from one order of things to another. Piety alone could open the fountains of liberality among the people, and piety must be the offspring of knowledge, of true knowledge of the Word of God. Pastors and schools were the want. “Everywhere we find,” said Luther, “poverty and penury. The Lord send laborers into His vineyard! Amen.” “The face of the Church is everywhere most wretched,” he wrote to Spalatin. “Sometimes we have a collection for the poor pastors, who have to till their two acres, which helps them a little. The peasants have nothing, and know nothing: they neither pray, confess, nor communicate, as if they were exempted from every religious duty. What an administration, that of the Papistical bishops!”

The Reformer had seen the nakedness of the land: this was the first step toward the remedying of it. The darkness was Cimmerian. He could not have believed, unless he had had personal knowledge of it, how entirely without intellectual and spiritual culture the Church of Rome had left the German peasant. Here was another misdeed for which Rome would have to account at the bar of future ages: nor was this the least of the great crimes of which he held her guilty. Her surpassing pride he already knew: it was proclaimed to the world in the exceeding loftiness of the titles of her Popes. The tyranny of her rule he also knew: it was exhibited in the statutes of her canon law and the edicts of her Councils. Her intolerance stood confessed in the slaughter of the Albigenses and the stake of Huss: her avarice in the ever-multiplying extortions under which Germany groaned, and of which he had had new and recent proofs in the neglected fields and unoccupied dwellings that met his eye on his visitation tour.

What her indulgence boxes meant he also knew. But here was another product of the Romish system. It had covered the nations with a darkness so deep that the very idea of a God was almost lost. The closer he came to this state of things, the more appalling and frightful he saw it to be. The German nations were, doubtless, but a sample of the rest of Christendom.

It was not Romanism only, but all religion that was on the point of perishing. “If,” said Luther, writing to the Elector of Saxony soon thereafter, “the old state of things had been suffered to reach its natural termination, the world must have fallen to pieces, and Christianity have been turned into Atheism.” The Reformer made haste to drive away the night which had descended on the world. This, in fact, had been the object of his labors ever since he himself had come to the knowledge of the truth; but he now saw more clearly how this was to be done. Accordingly the moment he had ended his visitation and returned to Wittenberg, he sat down, not to write a commentary or a controversial tract, but a catechism for the German peasantry. This manual of rudimentary instruction was ready early next spring (1529). It was published in two forms, Shorter and a Larger Catechism. The former comprised a brief and simple exposition of the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Sacraments, with forms of prayer for night and morning, and grace before and after meals, with a “House-table” or series of Scripture texts for daily use; his Larger Catechism contained a fuller and more elaborate exposition of the same matters. Few of his writings have been more useful.

His Commentaries and other works had enlightened the nobility and instructed the more intelligent of the townspeople; but in his Catechisms the “light was parted” and diffused over the “plains,” as it had once been over the “mountain-tops.” When the earth is a parched desert, its herbs burned up, it is not the stately river rolling along within its banks that will make the fields to flourish anew. Its floods pass on to the ocean, and the thirsty land, with its drooping and dying plants, tasting not of its waters, continues still to languish. But with the dew or the rain-cloud it is not so.

They descend softly, almost unseen and unheard by man, but their effects are mighty. Their myriad drops bathe every flower, penetrate to the roots of every herb, and soon hill and plain are seen smiling in fertility and beauty. So with these rudiments of Divine knowledge, parted in these little books, and sown like the drops of dew, they penetrated the understandings of the populations among which they were cast, and wherever they entered they awoke conscience, they quickened the intellect, and evoked a universal outburst, first of the spiritual activities, and next of the intellectual and political powers; while the nations that enjoyed no such watering lay unquickened, their slumber became deeper every century, till at last they realised their present condition in which they afford to Protestant nations a contrast that is not more melancholy than it is instructive.

CHAPTER - POLITICS AND PRODIGIES.

Wars—Francis I. Violates his Treaty with Charles—The Turk—The Pope and the Emperor again become Friends—Failure of the League of Cognac—Subjection of Italy to Spain—New League between the Pope and the Emperor —Heresy to be Extinguished—A New Diet summoned—Prodigies—Otto Pack—His Story—The Lutheran Princes prepare for War against the Popish Confederates—Luther Interposes— War Averted—Martyrs.

PICTURE: King Ferdinand afterwards Emperor of Germany PICTURE: Arrival of King Ferdinand at Spires WHILE within the inner circle formed by that holy society which we have seen rising there was peace, outside of it, on the open stage of the world, there raged furious storms. Society was convulsed by wars and rumors of wars. Francis I., who had obtained his liberty by signing the Treaty of Madrid, was no sooner back in France, breathing its air and inhaling the incense of the Louvre, than he declared the conditions which had opened to him escape from captivity intolerable, and made no secret of his intention to violate them. He applied to the Pope for a dispensation from them. The Pope, now at open feud with the emperor, released Francis from his obligations. This kindled anew the flames of war in Europe. The French king, instead of marching under the banner of Charles, and fighting for the extinction of heresy, as he had solemnly bound himself to do, got together his soldiers, and sent them across the Alps to attack the emperor in Italy.

Charles, in consequence, had to fight over again for the possessions in the peninsula, which the victory of Pavia he believed had securely given him.

In another quarter trouble arose. Henry of England, who till now had been on the most friendly terms with the emperor, having moved in the matter of his divorce from his queen, Catherine, the emperor’s aunt, was also sending hostile messages to the Spanish monarch. To complete the embroilment, the Turk was thundering at the gates of Austria, and threatening to march right into the heart of Christendom. Passing Vienna, Suleiman was pouring his hordes into Hungary; he had slain Louis, the king of that country, in the terrible battle of Mohacz; and the Arch-Duke Ferdinand of Austria, leaving the Reformers at liberty to prosecute their work of upbuilding, had suddenly quitted the Diet of Spires and gone to contest on many a bloody field his claim to the now vacant throne of Hungary. On every side the sword was busy. Armies were continually on the march; cities were being besieged; Europe was a sea on whose bosom the great winds from the four quarters of the heavens were contending in all their fury.

Continual perplexity was the lot of the monarchs of that age. But all their Perplexities grew out of that mysterious movement which was springing up in the midst of them, and which possessed the strange, and to them terrible, faculty of converting everything that was meant for its harm into the means of its advancement. The uneasiness of the monarchs was shown in their continual shiftings. Scarcely had one combination been formed, when it was broken in pieces, and another and a different one put in its place. We have just seen the Pope and the emperor at feud. We again behold them becoming confederates, and joining their swords, so recently pointed at each other, for the extinction of the heresy of Wittenberg. The train of political events by which this came about may be told in a few words.

The expedition of the French king into Italy, in violation, as we have seen, of the Treaty of Madrid, was at first successful. His general, Lautrec, sweeping down from the Alps, took the cities of Alessandria and Pavia. At the latter place Francis I. had been defeated and made captive, and his soldiers, with a cruelty that disgraced themselves more than it avenged their master, plundered it, having first put its inhabitants to the sword.

Lautrec crossed the Apennines, intending to continue his march to Rome, and open the doors of the Castle of St. Angelo, where Clement VII. still remained shut up. The Pope meanwhile, having paid the first instalment of a ransom of 400,000 crowns, and having but little hope of being able to pay the remainder, wearied with his imprisonment, disguised himself as a merchant, and escaped, with a single attendant, to Orvieto. The French general pressed on to Naples, only to find that victory had forsaken his banners. Smitten by the plague rather than the Spanish sword, his army melted away, his conquests came to nothing, and the emperor finally recovered his power both in Naples and Lombardy, and again became unchallenged master of Italy, to the terror of the Pope and the chagrin of the Italians. Thus the war which Italy had commenced under the auspices of Clement VII., and the vague aspirations of the Renaissance, for the purpose of raising ifself to the rank of an independent sovereignty, ended in its thorough subjection to the foreigner, not again to know emancipation or freedom till our own times, when independence dawned upon it in 1848, and was consummated in 1870, when the Italian troops, under the broad aegis of the new German Empire, entered Rome, and Victor Emmanuel was installed in the quirinal as monarch from the Alps to Sicily.

Thus the League of Cognac had utterly failed; the last hopes of the Renaissance expired; and Charles once more was master.

Finding that the emperor was the stronger, the Pope tacked about, cast Francis I. overboard, and gave his hand to Charles V. The emperor’s ambition had alarmed the Pontiff aforetime; he was now stronger than ever.

The pope consoled himself by reflecting that Charles was a devoted son of Catholicism, and that the power which he had not the strength to curb he had the craft to use.

Accordingly, on the 29th June, 1528, Clement concluded a peace with the emperor at Barcelona, on the promise that Charles would do his utmost to root out that nest of heretics which had been formed at Wittenberg, and to exalt the dominion and glory of the Roman See. The moment seemed opportune for finishing with heresy. Italy was now at the feet of the emperor; Francis I. and his kingdom had been chastised, and were not likely soon again to appear in arms on the south of the Alps; the tide of Turkish invasion had been rolled back; the Pope was again the friend of the emperor, and all things seemed to invite Charles to all enterprise which he had been compelled to postpone, and at times to dissemble, but which he had never abandoned.

It was not his intention, however, to draw the sword in the first instance.

Charles was naturally humane; and though intent on the extinction of the Reformed movement, foreseeing that it would infallibly break up his vast Empire, he preferred accomplishing his purpose by policy, if that were possible. He would convoke a Diet: he would get the Wittenberg heresy condemned, in which case he hoped that the majority of the princes would go along with him, and that the leaders of the Protestant movement would defer to this display of moral power. If still they should prove intractable, why, then he would employ force; but in that case, he argued, the blame would not lie at his door. The emperor, by letters dated Valladolid, Augrest 1st, 1528, convoked a Diet to meet at Spires, on the 21st February, 1529. Meanwhile, vague rumors of what was on the carpet reached the Reformers in Germany. They looked with apprehension to the future.

Other things helped to deepen these gloomy forebodings. The natural atmosphere would seem to have been not less deranged than the political.

Portentous meteors shot athwart the sky, marking their path in lines of fire, and aftrighting men with their horrid noise. The hyperborean lights, in sudden bursts and flashing lines, like squadrons rushing to combat, illumined the nocturnal heavens. Rivers rising in flood overflowed their banks, and meadows, corn-fields, and in some instances whole provinces, lay drowned beneath their waters. Great winds tore up ancient trees; and, as if the pillars of the world were growing feeble and toppling, earthquakes shook kingdoms, and engulfed castles and towns. “Behold,” said the men who witnessed these occurrences, “Behold the prognostics of the dire calamities which are about to overwhelm the world.” Even Luther partook of the general terror. “Dr. Hess,” says he, writes me word that in December last the whole heavens were seen on fire above the Church of Breslau, and another day there were witnessed, in the same place, two circles of fire, one within the other, and in the center of them a blazing pinar.

These signs announce, it is my firm opinion, the approach of the Last Day.

The Roman Empire tends nearly to its ruin; the Turk has attained the summit of his power; the Papal splendor is fast becoming eclipsed; the world cracks in every direction as though about to fall in pieces.” While so many real dangers disturbed the age, a spurious or doubtful one had wellnigh precipitated the Reformation upon its ruin. A nobleman of Misnia, Otto Pack by name—a greedy, dissipated, and intriguing character, who had been some time vice-chancellor to Duke George of Saxony—came one day to Philip, the Landgrave of Hesse, and, looking grave, professed to be in possession of a terrible secret, which much concerned him and his Lutheran confederate, the Elector of Saxony. 4 On being pressed to explain himself, he declared his readiness, on payment of a certain sum, to reveal all. The landgrave’s fears being thoroughly aroused, he agreed to pay the man the reward demanded. Pack went on to say that a diabolical plot had been hatched among the Popish princes, headed by the Archduke Ferdinand, to attack by arms the two heretical princes, John of Saxony and Philip of Hesse, strip them of their territories, seize upon Luther and[all his followers, and, having disposed of them by summary means, to reestablish the ancient worship. Pack was unable to show to the landgrave the original of this atrocious league, but he produced what bore to be a copy, and which, having attached to it all the ducal and electoral seals, wore every appearance of being authentic, and the document convinced the landgrave that Pack’s story was true.

Astounded at the danger thus strangely disclosed, and deeming that they had not a moment to lose before the mine exploded, the elector and the landgrave hastily raised an army to avert from themselves and their subjects what they believed to be impending destruction. The two princes entered into a formal compact (March 9th, 1528) “to protect with body, dignity, and possession, and every means in their power, the sacred deposit of God’s word for themselves and their subjects.”

They next looked around for allies. They hoped through the Duke of Prussia to incite the King of Poland against Ferdinand of Austria, and to keep the Franconian bishops in check by the arms of George of Brandenburg. They reckoned on having as auxiliaries the Dukes of Luneburg, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and the city of Magdeburg. For themselves they agreed to equip a force of 6,000 cavalry, and 20,000 infantry. 6 They had in view also a league with the King of Denmark. They resolved to anticipate their opponents by striking the first blow. All Germany was in commotion. It was now the turn of the Popish princes to tremble. The Reformers were flying to arms, and before their own preparations could be finished, they would be assailed by an overwhelming host, set on by the startling rumors of the savage plot, formed to exterminate them. The Reformation was on the point of being dragged into the battlefield. Luther shuddered when he saw what was about to happen.

He stood up manfully before the two chiefs who were hurrying the movement into this fatal path, and though he believed in the reality of the plot, despite the indignant denial of Duke George and the Popish princes, he charged the elector and landgrave not to strike the first blow, but to wait till they had been attacked. “There is strife enough uninvited,” said he, “and it cannot be well to paint the devil over the door, or ask him to be godfather. Battle never wins much, but always loses much, and hazards all; meekness loses nothing, hazards little, and wins all.”

Luther’s counsels ultimately prevailed, time was given for reflection, and thus the Lutheran princes were saved from the tremendous error which would have brought after it, not triumph, but destruction. Meanwhile the Reformation was winning victories a hundred times more glorious than any that armed hosts could have achieved for it. One martyr is worth more than a thousand soldiers. Such were the champions the Reformation was now sending forth. Such were the proofs it now began to give of its prowess—better, surely, than fields heaped with the slain, which even the worst of causes can show.

In Bavaria, Leonard Caspar at this time sealed his testimony with his blood. He was apprehended at the instance of the Bishop of Passau, and condemned for maintaining that man is justified by faith alone; that there are but two Sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper; that the mass is not a sacrifice, and avails not for the quick and the dead; and that Christ alone hath made satisfaction for us. 8 In Bavaria, where the Reformed doctrines dared not be preached, no better way could the bishop have taken for promulgating them than by burning this man for holding them. At Munich, George Carpenter was led to the stake for denying that the baptism of water can by its inherent virtue save men. “When you are in the fire,” said his friends, “give us a token that you abide steadfast.” “So long,” replied he, “as I am able to open my mouth I will confess my Savior.” 9 The executioner took him and bound him, and cast him into the flames. “Jesus, Jesus!” exclaimed the martyr. The executioner, with an iron hook, turned him round and round amid the blazing coals. “Jesus,Jesus!” the martyr continued to exclaim, and so confessing the name of his Lord he gave up the ghost in the fire. Thus another blazing torch was kindled in the midst of the darkness of Bavaria.

Other martyrs followed in those German provinces which still owned the jurisdiction of Popish princes. At Landsberg nine persons suffered in the fire, and at Munich twenty-nine were drowned in the Iser. In the case of others the more summary dispatch of the poignard was employed. In the spring of 1527, George Winkler, preacher at Halle, was summoned before Albert, Cardinal of Mainz. Being dismissed from the archbishop’s tribunal, he was mounted on the horse of the court fool, and made to set out on his journey homeward. His way led through a forest; suddenly a little troop of horsemen dashed out of the thicket, struck their swords into him, and again plunged into the wood. Booty was plainly not the object of the assassins, for neither money nor other article of value was taken from his person; it was the suspicion of heresy that drew their daggers upon him. Luther hoped that “his murdered blood, like Abel’s, might cry to God; or rather be as seed from which other preachers would spring.” “The world,” said he, “is a tavern, of which Satan is the landlord, and the sign over the doorway is murder and lying.” He almost envied these martyrs. “I am,” said he, “but a wordy preacher in comparison with these great doers.”

In the piles of these martyrs we hear the Reformation saying to the Lutheran princes, some of whom were so eager to help it with their swords, and thought that if they did not fight for it, it must perish, “Dismiss your armed levies. I will provide my own soldiers. I myself will furnish the armor in which they are to do battle; I will gird them with patience, meekness, heroism, and joy; these are the weapons with which they will combat. With these weapons they will break the power, foil the arts, and stain the pride of the enemy.”

CHAPTER - THE GREAT PROTEST

Diet of 1529—The Assembling of the Popish Princes—Their Numbers and high Hopes—Elector of Saxony—Arrival of Philip of Hesse—The Diet Meets—The Emperor’s Message—Shall the Diet Repeal the Edict (1526) of Toleration? —The Debate—A Middle Motion proposed by the Popish Members—This would have Stifled the Reformation in Germany—Passed by a Majority of Votes—The Crisis—Shall the Lutheran Princes Accept it?—Ferdinand hastily Quits the Diet— Protestant Princes Consult together—Their Protest—Their Name— Grandeur of the Issues.

PICTURE: The Elector of Saxony Reading the Protest at the Diet of Spires PICTURE: View of Marburg SUCH were the times that preceded the meeting of the famous Diet of Spires:—in the sky unusual portents, on the earth the smoke of martyrpiles, kings girding on the sword, and nations disturbed by rumors of intrigue and war, heaving like the ocean before the tempest sets in.

Meanwhile the time approached for the Diet to assemble. It had been convoked for February, but was not able to meet till the middle of March.

At no former Diet had the attendance, especially on the Catholic side, been so numerous. 1 The Popish princes came first. The little town was all astir as each magnate announced his arrival at its gates, and rode through its streets, followed by an imposing display of armed followers. 2 First in rank was King Ferdinand, who was to preside in the absence of his brother Charles V., and came attended by 300 armed knights. After him came the Dukes of Bavaria with an equally large retinue; then followed the ecclesiastical electors of Mainz and Treves, and the Bishops of Trent and Hildesheim, each with a troop of horsemen. 3 Their haughty looks, and the boastful greetings they exchanged with one another, proclaimed the confident hopes they cherished of being able to carry matters in the Diet their own way. They had come to bury the Reformation. 4 The last to arrive were the Reformed princes. On the 13th of March came Elector John of Saxony, the most powerful prince of the Empire. His entrance was the most modest of all. There rode by his side none but Melanchthon. 5 Philip of Hesse followed on the 18th of March. With characteristic pomp he passed in with sound of trumpet, followed by a troop of 200 horsemen. It was on the eve of Palm Sunday that the elector, with Melanchthon by his side, entered Spires. On the following day he had public worship in his hotel, and as an evidence that the popular favor for the Word of God had not abated, not fewer than 8,000 attended sermon both forenoon and afternoon. 6 When the deputies of the cities had arrived, the constituent members of the Diet were complete, and the business was opened.

The Diet was not long left in suspense as to the precise object of the emperor in convoking it, and the legislation which was expected from it.

Scarcely had it met when it received the intimation from commissioners that it was the emperor’s will and command that the Diet should repeal the Edict of Spires (1526). 7 This was all. The members might dispatch their business in an hour, and return in peace to their homes.

But let us see how much was included in this short message, and how much the Diet was asked to do—what a revolution it was bidden inaugurate, when it was asked to repeal the edict of 1526. That edict guaranteed the free exercise of their religion to the several States of the Empire till a General Council should meet. It was, as we have already said, the first legal establishment of the Reformation. Religious freedom, then, so far as enjoyed in Germany, the Diet was now asked to abolish. But this was not all. The edict of 1526 suspended legally the execution of the Edict of Worms of 1521, which proscribed Luther and condemned the Reformation. Abolish the edict of 1526, and the edict of 1521 would come into operation; Luther must be put to death; the Reformed opinions must be rooted out of all the countries where they had taken root; in short, the floodgates of a measureless persecution would be opened in Germany.

This was the import of the curt and haughty message with which Charles startled the Diet at its opening. The sending of such a message even was a violation of the constitutional rights of the several States, and an assumption of power which no former emperor had dared to make. The message, if passed into law, would have laid the rights of conscience, the independence of the Diet, and the liberties of Germany, all three in the dust.

The struggle now began. Shall the Edict of Spires (1526) be repealed? The Popish members of the Diet strenuously insisted that it should at once be repealed. It protected, they affirmed, all kinds of abominable opinions; it fostered the growth of heretical and disloyal communities, meaning the Churches which the three years of peace enjoyed under the edict had permitted to be organised. In short, it was the will of the emperor, and whoever opposed its repeal was not the friend of Charles.

The Reformed princes, on the other side, maintained that this edict was now the constitution of the Empire, that it had been unanimously sworn to by all the members of the Diet; that to repeal it would be a public breach of national faith, and that to the Lutheran princes would remain the right of resisting such a step by force of arms.

The majority of the Diet, though exceedingly anxious to oblige the emperor, felt the force of these strong arguments. They saw that the ground of the oppositionists was a constitutional and legal one. Each principality had the right of regulating its own internal affairs. The faith and worship of their subjects was one of these. But a majority of the Diet now claimed the right to decide that question for each separate State. If they should succeed, it was clear that a new order of things would be introduced into Germany. A central authority would usurp the rights of the local administrat