Church.1 Of one hundred parishes, only four continued to celebrate mass.* 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 honourable kind.3 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 The Lutheranism which had superseded the Romanism was, in many instances, interpreted to mean simply a release from the obligation to pay ecclesiastical dues, and to give attendance on church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. 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, even the knowledge of the Word of God. Pastors and schools were the great want. “ 'Everywhere we find," said Luther," poverty and penury. The Lord send labourers 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

1 Seckendorf, lib. ii., sec. 18; Additio i. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.

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."5

The Reformer made haste to drive away the night which had descended on the world. This, in fact, had been the object of his labours 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 Wittemberg, 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, a 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 “

5 Seckendorf, lib. ii., sec. 14, p. 130.

moun

tain-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 raincloud 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

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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 sowing lay unquickened, their slumber became deeper every century, till at last they realised their present condition, in which they present to Protestant nations a contrast that is not more melancholy than it is instructive.

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 rumours 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. 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

In

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, Solyman 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 Wittemberg. 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 Alexandria 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 itself 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 ægis 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; but he 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 might have 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 Wittemberg, and to exalt the dominion and glory of the Roman See.1

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 an 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 Wittemberg 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, August 1st, 1528, convoked a Diet to meet at Spires, on the 21st February, 1529.o

Meanwhile, vague rumours 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 affrighting 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 tottering, 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. 2 Sleidan, bk. vi., p. 115.

1 Ranke, vol. i., p. 84.

"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 centre of them a blazing pillar. 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 splendour is fast becoming eclipsed; the world cracks in every direction as though about to fall in pieces." 1

On

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. 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 re-establish the ancient worship.3

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."

1 Werke, ix. 542. Michelet, Luther, p. 210.

2 Seckendorf, lib. ii., sec. 13, p. 94.

3 Sleidan, bk. vi., p. 114.

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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. 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 rumours 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

4 Seckendorf, lib. ii., sec. 13, pp. 95-98.

5 See details in Sleidan, bk. vi.; Seckendorf, lib. ii., sec. 13; D'Aubigné, bk. xiii., chap. 4; Michelet, Luther, bk. iii., chap. 1. Some mystery rests on this affair still, but when we take into account the league formed at Ratisbon four years before, the principles and practices of the men at whose door this design was laid, and the fact that the most of the Popish princes agreed to pay a large sum as an indemnity to the Lutheran princes for the expense to which they had been put in raising armaments to defend themselves, we may be disposed to think that Luther's opinion was not far from the truth, that the league if not concluded had been conceived,