THE REFORMATION AND ITS EFFECTS UPON THE EMPIRE.
The Reformation falls to be mentioned here, of course not as a
religious movement, but as the cause of political changes, which still
further rent the Empire, and struck at the root of the theory by which
it had been created and upheld. Luther completed the work of
Hildebrand. Hitherto it had seemed not impossible to strengthen the
German state into a monarchy, compact if not despotic; the very Diet
of Worms, where the monk of Wittenberg proclaimed to an astonished
church and Emperor that the day of spiritual tyranny was past, had
framed and presented a fresh scheme for the construction of a central
council of government. The great religious schism put an end to all
such hopes, for it became a source of political disunion far more
serious and permanent than any that had existed before, and it taught
the two factions into which Germany was henceforth divided to regard
each other with feelings more bitter than those of hostile nations.
[Sidenote: Accession of Charles V (1519-1558).]
The breach came at the most unfortunate time possible. After an
election, more memorable than any preceding, an election in which
Francis the First of France and Henry the Eighth of England had been
his competitors, a prince had just ascended the imperial throne who
united dominions vaster than any Europe had seen since the days of his
great namesake. Spain and Naples, Flanders, and other parts of the
Burgundian lands, as well as large regions in Eastern Germany, obeyed
Charles: he drew inexhaustible revenues from a new empire beyond the
Atlantic. Such a power, directed by a mind more resolute and profound
than that of Maximilian his grandfather, might have well been able,
despite the stringency of his coronation engagements[368], and the
watchfulness of the electors[369], to override their usurped
privileges, and make himself practically as well as officially the
head of the nation. Charles the Fifth, though from the coldness of his
manner[370] and his Flemish speech never a favourite among the
Germans, was in point of fact far stronger than Maximilian or any
other Emperor who had reigned for three centuries. In Italy he
succeeded, after long struggles with the Pope and the French, in
rendering himself supreme: England he knew how to lead, by flattering
Henry and cajoling Wolsey: from no state but France had he serious
opposition to fear. To this strength his imperial dignity was indeed a
mere accident: its sources were the infantry of Spain, the looms of
Flanders, the sierras of Peru. But the conquest once achieved, might
could lose itself in right; and as an earlier Charles had veiled the
terror of the Frankish sword under the mask of Roman election, so
might his successor sway a hundred provinces with the sole name of
Roman Emperor, and transmit to his race a dominion as wide and more
enduring.
[Sidenote: Attitude of Charles towards the religious movement.]
One is tempted to speculate as to what might have happened had Charles
espoused the reforming cause. His reverence for the Pope's person is
sufficiently seen in the sack of Rome and the captivity of Clement;
the traditions of his office might have led him to tread in the steps
of the Henrys and the Fredericks, into which even the timid Lewis the
Fourth and the unstable Sigismund had sometimes ventured; the
awakening zeal of the German people, exasperated by the exactions of
the Romish court, would have strengthened his hands, and enabled him,
while moderating the excesses of change, to fix his throne on the deep
foundations of national love. It may well be doubted--Englishmen at
least have reason for the doubt--whether the Reformation would not
have lost as much as it could have gained by being entangled in the
meshes of royal patronage. But, setting aside Charles's personal
leaning to the old faith, and forgetting that he was king of the most
bigoted race of Europe, his position as Emperor made him almost
perforce the Pope's ally. The Empire had been called into being by
Rome, had vaunted the protection of the Apostolic See as its highest
earthly privilege, had latterly been wont, especially in Hapsburg
hands, to lean on the papacy for support. Itself founded entirely on
prescription and the traditions of immemorial reverence, how could it
abandon the cause which the longest prescription and the most solemn
authority had combined to consecrate? With the German clergy, despite
occasional quarrels, it had been on better terms than with the lay
aristocracy; their heads had been the chief ministers of the crown;
the advocacies of their abbeys were the last source of imperial
revenue to disappear. To turn against them now, when furiously
assailed by heretics; to abrogate claims hallowed by antiquity and a
hundred laws, would be to pronounce its own sentence, and the fall of
the eternal city's spiritual dominion must involve the fall of what
still professed to be her temporal. Charles would have been glad to
see some abuses corrected; but a broad line of policy was called for,
and he cast in his lot with the Catholics[371].
[Sidenote: Ultimate failure of the repressive policy of Charles.]
[Sidenote: Ferdinand I, 1558-1564.]
[Sidenote: Maximilian II, 1564-1576.]
[Sidenote: Destruction of the Germanic state-system.]
Of many momentous results only a few need be noticed here. The
reconstruction of the old imperial system, upon the basis of Hapsburg
power, proved in the end impossible. Yet for some years it had seemed
actually accomplished. When the Smalkaldic league had been dissolved
and its leaders captured, the whole country lay prostrate before
Charles. He overawed the Diet at Augsburg by the Spanish soldiery: he
forced formularies of doctrine upon the vanquished Protestants: he set
up and pulled down whom he would throughout Germany, amid the muttered
discontent of his own partisans. Then, as in the beginning of the year
1552, he lay at Innsbruck, fondly dreaming that his work was done,
waiting the spring weather to cross to Trent, where the Catholic
fathers had again met to settle the world's faith for it, news was
suddenly brought that North Germany was in arms, and that the revolted
Maurice of Saxony had seized Donauwerth, and was hurrying through the
Bavarian Alps to surprise his sovereign. Charles rose and fled
southwards over the snows of the Brenner, then eastwards, under the
blood-red cliffs of dolomite that wall in the Pusterthal, far away
into the valleys of Carinthia: the council of Trent broke up in
consternation: Europe saw and the Emperor acknowledged that in his
fancied triumph over the spirit of revolution he had done no more than
block up for the moment an irresistible torrent. When this last effort
to produce religious uniformity by violence had failed as hopelessly
as the previous devices of holding discussions of doctrine and calling
a general council, a sort of armistice was agreed to in 1554, which
lasted in mutual fear and suspicion for more than sixty years. Four
years after this disappointment of the hopes and projects which had
occupied his busy life, Charles, weighed down by cares and with the
shadow of coming death already upon him, resigned the sovereignty of
Spain and the Indies, of Flanders and Naples, into the hands of his
son Philip the Second; while the imperial sceptre passed to his
brother Ferdinand, who had been some time before chosen King of the
Romans. Ferdinand was content to leave things much as he found them,
and the amiable Maximilian II, who succeeded him, though personally
well inclined to the Protestants, found himself fettered by his
position and his allies, and could do little or nothing to quench the
flame of religious and political hatred. Germany remained divided into
two omnipresent factions, and so further than ever from harmonious
action, or a tightening of the long-loosened bond of feudal
allegiance. The states of either creed being gathered into a league,
there could no longer be a recognized centre of authority for judicial
or administrative purposes. Least of all could a centre be sought in
the Emperor, the leader of the papal party, the suspected foe of every
Protestant. Too closely watched to do anything of his own authority,
too much committed to one party to be accepted as a mediator by the
other, he was driven to attain his own objects by falling in with the
schemes and furthering the selfish ends of his adherents, by becoming
the accomplice or the tool of the Jesuits. The Lutheran princes
addressed themselves to reduce a power of which they had still an
over-sensitive dread, and found when they exacted from each successive
sovereign engagements more stringent than his predecessor's, that in
this, and this alone, their Catholic brethren were not unwilling to
join them. Thus obliged to strip himself one by one of the ancient
privileges of his crown, the Emperor came to have little influence on
the government except that which his intrigues might exercise. Nay, it
became almost impossible to maintain a government at all. For when the
Reformers found themselves outvoted at the Diet, they declared that in
matters of religion a majority ought not to bind a minority. As the
measures were few which did not admit of being reduced to this
category, for whatever benefited the Emperor or any other Catholic
prince injured the Protestants, nothing could be done save by the
assent of two bitterly hostile factions. Thus scarce anything was
done; and even the courts of justice were stopped by the disputes that
attended the appointment of every judge or assessor.
[Sidenote: Alliance of the Protestants with France.]
In the foreign politics of Germany another result followed. Inferior
in military force and organization, the Protestant princes at first
provided for their safety by forming leagues among themselves. The
device was an old one, and had been employed by the monarch himself
before now, in despair at the effete and cumbrous forms of the
imperial system. Soon they began to look beyond the Vosges, and found
that France, burning heretics at home, was only too happy to smile on
free opinions elsewhere. The alliance was easily struck; Henry the
Second assumed in 1552 the title of 'Protector of the Germanic
liberties,' and a pretext for interference was never wanting in
future.
[Sidenote: The Reformation spirit, and its influence upon the Empire.]
[Sidenote: Effect of the Reformation on the doctrines regarding the
Visible Church.]
These were some of the visible political consequences of the great
religious schism of the sixteenth century. But beyond and above them
there was a change far more momentous than any of its immediate
results. There is perhaps no event in history which has been represented
in so great a variety of lights as the Reformation. It has been called
a revolt of the laity against the clergy, or of the Teutonic races
against the Italians, or of the kingdoms of Europe against the
universal monarchy of the Popes. Some have seen in it only a burst of
long-repressed anger at the luxury of the prelates and the manifold
abuses of the ecclesiastical system; others a renewal of the youth of
the church by a return to primitive forms of doctrine. All these
indeed to some extent it was; but it was also something more profound,
and fraught with mightier consequences than any of them. It was in its
essence the assertion of the principle of individuality--that is to
say, of true spiritual freedom. Hitherto the personal consciousness
had been a faint and broken reflection of the universal; obedience had
been held the first of religious duties; truth had been conceived as a
something external and positive, which the priesthood who were its
stewards were to communicate to the passive layman, and whose saving
virtue lay not in its being felt and known by him to be truth, but in
a purely formal and unreasoning acceptance. The great principles which
mediæval Christianity still cherished were obscured by the limited,
rigid, almost sensuous forms which had been forced on them in times of
ignorance and barbarism. That which was in its nature abstract, had
been able to survive only by taking a concrete expression. The
universal consciousness became the Visible Church: the Visible Church
hardened into a government and degenerated into a hierarchy. Holiness
of heart and life was sought by outward works, by penances and
pilgrimages, by gifts to the poor and to the clergy, wherein there
dwelt often little enough of a charitable mind. The presence of divine
truth among men was symbolized under one aspect by the existence on
earth of an infallible Vicar of God, the Pope; under another, by the
reception of the present Deity in the sacrifice of the mass; in a
third, by the doctrine that the priest's power to remit sins and
administer the sacraments depended upon a transmission of miraculous
gifts which can hardly be called other than physical. All this system
of doctrine, which might, but for the position of the church as a
worldly and therefore obstructive power, have expanded, renewed, and
purified itself during the four centuries that had elapsed since its
completion[372], and thus remained in harmony with the growing
intelligence of mankind, was suddenly rent in pieces by the convulsion
of the Reformation, and flung away by the more religious and more
progressive peoples of Europe. That which was external and concrete,
was in all things to be superseded by that which was inward and
spiritual. It was proclaimed that the individual spirit, while it
continued to mirror itself in the world-spirit, had nevertheless an
independent existence as a centre of self-issuing force, and was to be
in all things active rather than passive. Truth was no longer to be
truth to the soul until it should have been by the soul recognized,
and in some measure even created; but when so recognized and felt, it
is able under the form of faith to transcend outward works and to
transform the dogmas of the understanding; it becomes the living
principle within each man's breast, infinite itself, and expressing
itself infinitely through his thoughts and acts. He who as a spiritual
being was delivered from the priest, and brought into direct relation
with the Divinity, needed not, as heretofore, to be enrolled a member
of a visible congregation of his fellows, that he might live a pure
and useful life among them. Thus by the Reformation the Visible Church
as well as the priesthood lost that paramount importance which had
hitherto belonged to it, and sank from being the depositary of all
religious tradition, the source and centre of religious life, the
arbiter of eternal happiness or misery, into a mere association of
Christian men, for the expression of mutual sympathy and the better
attainment of certain common ends. Like those other doctrines which
were now assailed by the Reformation, this mediæval view of the nature
of the Visible Church had been naturally, and so, it may be said,
necessarily developed between the third and the twelfth century, and
must therefore have represented the thoughts and satisfied the wants
of those times. By the Visible Church the flickering lamp of knowledge
and literary culture, as well as of religion, had been fed and tended
through the long night of the Dark Ages. But, like the whole
theological fabric of which it formed a part, it was now hard and
unfruitful, identified with its own worst abuses, capable apparently
of no further development, and unable to satisfy minds which in
growing stronger had grown more conscious of their strength. Before
the awakened zeal of the northern nations it stood a cold and lifeless
system, whose organization as a hierarchy checked the free activity of
thought, whose bestowal of worldly power and wealth on spiritual
pastors drew them away from their proper duties, and which by
maintaining alongside of the civil magistracy a co-ordinate and rival
government, maintained also that separation of the spiritual element
in man from the secular, which had been so complete and so pernicious
during the Middle Ages, which debases life, and severs religion from
morality.
[Sidenote: Consequent effect upon the Empire.]
The Reformation, it may be said, was a religious movement: and it is
the Empire, not the Church, that we have here to consider. The
distinction is only apparent. The Holy Empire is but another name for
the Visible Church. It has been shewn already how mediæval theory
constructed the State on the model of the Church; how the Roman Empire
was the shadow of the Popedom--designed to rule men's bodies as the
pontiff ruled their souls. Both alike claimed obedience on the ground
that Truth is One, and that where there is One faith there must be One
government[373]. And, therefore, since it was this very principle of
Formal Unity that the Reformation overthrew, it became a revolt
against despotism of every kind; it erected the standard of civil as
well as of religious liberty, since both of them are needed, though
needed in a different measure, for the worthy development of the
individual spirit. The Empire had never been conspicuously the
antagonist of popular freedom, and was, even under Charles the Fifth,
far less formidable to the commonalty than were the petty princes of
Germany. But submission, and submission on the ground of indefeasible
transmitted right, upon the ground of Catholic traditions and the duty
of the Christian magistrate to suffer heresy and schism as little as
the parallel sins of treason and rebellion, had been its constant
claim and watchword. Since the days of Julius Cæsar it had passed
through many phases, but in none of them had it ever been a
constitutional monarchy, pledged to the recognition of popular rights.
And hence the indirect tendency of the Reformation to narrow the
province of government and exalt the privileges of the subject was as
plainly adverse to the Empire as the Protestant claim of the right of
private judgment was to the pretensions of the Papacy and the
priesthood.
[Sidenote: Immediate influence of the Reformation on political and
religious liberty.]
[Sidenote: Conduct of the Protestant States.]
The remark must not be omitted in passing, how much less than might
have been expected the religious movement did at first actually effect
in the way of promoting either political progress or freedom of
conscience. The habits of centuries were not to be unlearnt in a few
years, and it was natural that ideas struggling into existence and
activity should work erringly and imperfectly for a time. By a few
inflammable minds liberty was carried into antinomianism, and produced
the wildest excesses of life and doctrine. Several fantastic sects
arose, refusing to conform to the ordinary rules without which human
society could not subsist. But these commotions neither spread widely
nor lasted long. Far more pervading and more remarkable was the other
error, if that can be called an error which was the almost unavoidable
result of the circumstances of the time. The principles which had led
the Protestants to sever themselves from the Roman Church, should have
taught them to bear with the opinions of others, and warned them from
the attempt to connect agreement in doctrine or manner of worship with
the necessary forms of civil government. Still less ought they to have
enforced that agreement by civil penalties; for faith, upon their own
shewing, had no value save when it was freely given. A church which
does not claim to be infallible is bound to allow that some part of
the truth may possibly be with its adversaries: a church which permits
or encourages human reason to apply itself to revelation has no right
first to argue with people and then to punish them if they are not
convinced. But whether it was that men only half saw what they had
done, or that finding it hard enough to unrivet priestly fetters, they
welcomed all the aid a temporal prince could give, the result was that
religion, or rather religious creeds, began to be involved with
politics more closely than had ever been the case before. Through the
greater part of Christendom wars of religion raged for a century or
more, and down to our own days feelings of theological antipathy
continue to affect the relations of the powers of Europe. In almost
every country the form of doctrine which triumphed associated itself
with the state, and maintained the despotic system of the Middle Ages,
while it forsook the grounds on which that system had been based. It
was thus that there arose National Churches, which were to be to the
several countries of Europe that which the Church Catholic had been to
the world at large; churches, that is to say, each of which was to be
co-extensive with its respective state, was to enjoy landed wealth and
exclusive political privilege, and was to be armed with coercive
powers against recusants. It was not altogether easy to find a set of
theoretical principles on which such churches might be made to rest,
for they could not, like the old church, point to the historical
transmission of their doctrines; they could not claim to have in any
one man or body of men an infallible organ of divine truth; they could
not even fall back upon general councils, or the argument, whatever it
may be worth, '_Securus iudicat orbis terrarum_.' But in practice
these difficulties were soon got over, for the dominant party in each
state, if it was not infallible, was at any rate quite sure that it
was right, and could attribute the resistance of other sects to
nothing but moral obliquity. The will of the sovereign, as in England,
or the will of the majority, as in Holland, Scandinavia, and Scotland,
imposed upon each country a peculiar form of worship, and kept up the
practices of mediæval intolerance without their justification.
Persecution, which might be at least excused in an infallible Catholic
and Apostolic Church, was peculiarly odious when practised by those
who were not catholic, who were no more apostolic than their
neighbours, and who had just revolted from the most ancient and
venerable authority in the name of rights which they now denied to
others. If union with the visible church by participation in a
material sacrament be necessary to eternal life, persecution may be
held a duty, a kindness to perishing souls. But if the kingdom of
heaven be in every sense a kingdom of the spirit, if saving faith be
possible out of one visible body and under a diversity of external
forms, persecution becomes at once a crime and a folly. Therefore the
intolerance of Protestants, if the forms it took were less cruel than
those practised by the Roman Catholics, was also far less defensible;
for it had seldom anything better to allege on its behalf than motives
of political expediency, or, more often, the mere headstrong passion
of a ruler or a faction to silence the expressions of any opinions but
their own. To enlarge upon this theme, did space permit it, would not
be to digress from the proper subject of this narrative. For the
Empire, as has been said more than once already, was far less an
institution than a theory or doctrine. And hence it is not too much to
say, that the ideas which have but recently ceased to prevail
regarding the duty of the magistrate to compel uniformity in doctrine
and worship by the civil arm, may all be traced to the relation which
that doctrine established between the Roman Church and the Roman
Empire; to the conception, in fact, of an Empire Church itself.
[Sidenote: Influence of the Reformation on the name and associations
of the Empire.]
Two of the ways in which the Reformation affected the Empire have been
now described: its immediate political results, and its far more
profound doctrinal importance, as implanting new ideas regarding the
nature of freedom and the province of government. A third, though
apparently almost superficial, cannot be omitted. Its name and its
traditions, little as they retained of their former magic power, were
still such as to excite the antipathy of the German reformers. The
form which the doctrine of the supreme importance of one faith and one
body of the faithful had taken was the dominion of the ancient capital
of the world through her spiritual head, the Roman bishop, and her
temporal head, the Emperor. As the names of Roman and Christian had
been once convertible, so long afterwards were those of Roman and
Catholic. The Reformation, separating into its parts what had hitherto
been one conception, attacked Romanism but not Catholicity, and formed
religious communities which, while continuing to call themselves
Christian, repudiated the form with which Christianity had been so
long identified in the West. As the Empire was founded upon the
assumption that the limits of Church and State are exactly
co-extensive, a change which withdrew half of its subjects from the
one body while they remained members of the other, transformed it
utterly, destroyed the meaning and value of its old arrangements, and
forced the Emperor into a strange and incongruous position. To his
Protestant subjects he was merely the head of the administration, to
the Catholics he was also the Defender and Advocate of their church.
Thus from being chief of the whole state he became the chief of a
party within it, the Corpus Catholicorum, as opposed to the Corpus
Evangelicorum; he lost what had been hitherto his most holy claim to
the obedience of the subject; the awakened feeling of German
nationality was driven into hostility to an institution whose title
and history bound it to the centre of foreign tyranny. After exulting
for seven centuries in the heritage of Roman rule, the Teutonic
nations cherished again the feelings with which their ancestors had
resisted Julius Cæsar and Germanicus. Two mutually repugnant systems
could not exist side by side without striving to destroy one another.
The instincts of theological sympathy overcame the duties of political
allegiance, and men who were subjects both of the Empire and of their
local prince, gave all their loyalty to him who espoused their
doctrines and protected their worship. For in North Germany, princes
as well as people were mostly Lutheran: in the southern and especially
the south-eastern lands, where the magnates held to the old faith,
Protestants were scarcely to be found except in the free cities. The
same causes which injured the Emperor's position in Germany swept away
the last semblance of his authority through other countries. In the
great struggle which followed, the Protestants of England and France,
of Holland and Sweden, thought of him only as the ally of Spain, of
the Vatican, of the Jesuits; and he of whom it had been believed a
century before that by nothing but his existence was the coming of
Antichrist on earth delayed, was in the eyes of the northern divines
either Antichrist himself or Antichrist's foremost champion. The
earthquake that opened a chasm in Germany was felt through Europe; its
states and peoples marshalled themselves under two hostile banners,
and with the Empire's expiring power vanished that united Christendom
it had been created to lead[374].
[Sidenote: Troubles of Germany.]
[Sidenote: Rudolf II, 1576-1612.]
[Sidenote: Matthias, 1612-1619.]
Some of the effects thus sketched began to shew themselves as early as
that famous Diet of Worms, from Luther's appearance at which, in A.D.
1521, we may date the beginning of the Reformation. But just as the
end of the religious conflict in England can hardly be placed earlier
than the Revolution of 1688, nor in France than the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes in 1685, so it was not till after more than a century
of doubtful strife that the new order of things was fully and finally
established in Germany. The arrangements of Augsburg, like most
treaties on the basis of _uti possidetis_, were no better than a
hollow truce, satisfying no one, and consciously made to be broken.
The church lands which Protestants had seized, and Jesuit confessors
urged the Catholic princes to reclaim, furnished an unceasing ground
of quarrel: neither party yet knew the strength of its antagonists
sufficiently to abstain from insulting or persecuting their modes of
worship, and the smouldering hate of half a century was kindled by the
troubles of Bohemia into the Thirty Years' War.
[Sidenote: Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648.]
[Sidenote: Ferdinand II, A.D. 1619-37.]
[Sidenote: Plans of Ferdinand II.]
[Sidenote: Gustavus Adolphus.]
[Sidenote: Ferdinand III, 1637-1658.]
[Sidenote: The peace of Westphalia.]
The imperial sceptre had now passed from the indolent and vacillating
Rudolf II (1576-1612), the corrupt and reckless policy of whose
ministers had done much to exasperate the already suspicious minds of
the Protestants, into the firmer grasp of Ferdinand the Second[375].
Jealous, bigoted, implacable, skilful in forming and concealing his
plans, resolute to obstinacy in carrying them out in action, the house
of Hapsburg could have had no abler and no more unpopular leader in
their second attempt to turn the German Empire into an Austrian
military monarchy. They seemed for a time as near to the
accomplishment of the project as Charles the Fifth had been. Leagued
with Spain, backed by the Catholics of Germany, served by such a
leader as Wallenstein, Ferdinand proposed nothing less than the
extension of the Empire to its old limits, and the recovery of his
crown's full prerogative over all its vassals. Denmark and Holland
were to be attacked by sea and land: Italy to be reconquered with the
help of Spain: Maximilian of Bavaria and Wallenstein to be rewarded
with principalities in Pomerania and Mecklenburg. The latter general
was all but master of Northern Germany when the successful resistance
of Stralsund turned the wavering balance of the war. Soon after (A.D.
1630), Gustavus Adolphus crossed the Baltic, and saved Europe from an
impending reign of the Jesuits. Ferdinand's high-handed proceedings
had already alarmed even the Catholic princes. Of his own authority he
had put the Elector Palatine and other magnates to the ban of the
Empire: he had transferred an electoral vote to Bavaria; had treated
the districts overrun by his generals as spoil of war, to be portioned
out at his pleasure; had unsettled all possession by requiring the
restitution of church property occupied since A.D. 1555. The
Protestants were helpless; the Catholics, though they complained of
the flagrant illegality of such conduct, did not dare to oppose it:
the rescue of Germany was the work of the Swedish king. In four
campaigns he destroyed the armies and the prestige of the Emperor;
devastated his lands, emptied his treasury, and left him at last so
enfeebled that no subsequent successes could make him again
formidable. Such, nevertheless, was the selfishness and apathy of the
Protestant princes, divided by the mutual jealousy of the Lutheran and
the Calvinist party--some, like the Saxon elector, most inglorious of
his inglorious house, bribed by the cunning Austrian; others afraid to
stir lest a reverse should expose them unprotected to his
vengeance--that the issue of the long protracted contest would have
gone against them but for the interference of France. It was the
leading principle of Richelieu's policy to depress the house of
Hapsburg and keep Germany disunited: hence he fostered Protestantism
abroad while trampling it down at home. The triumph he did not live to
see was sealed in A.D. 1648, on the utter exhaustion of all the
combatants, and the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück were
thenceforward the basis of the Germanic constitution.
FOOTNOTES:
[368] The so-called 'Wahlcapitulation.'
[369] The electors long refused to elect Charles, dreading his great
hereditary power, and were at last induced to do so only by their
overmastering fear of the Turks.
[370] Nearly all the Hapsburgs seem to have wanted that sort of genial
heartiness which, apt as it is to be stifled by education in the
purple, has nevertheless been possessed by several other royal lines,
greatly contributing to their vitality; as for instance by more than
one prince of the houses of Brunswick and Hohenzollern.
[371] See this brought out with great force in the very interesting
work of Padre Tosti, _Prolegomeni alla Storia Universale della
Chiesa_, from which I quote one passage, which bears directly on the
matter in hand: 'Il grido della riforma clericale aveva un eco
terribile in tutta la compagnia civile dei popoli: essa percuoteva le
cime del laicale potere, e rimbalzava per tutta la gerarchia sociale.
Se l'imperadore Sigismondo nel concilio di Costanza non avesse
fiutate queste consequenze nella eresia di Hus e di Girolamo di Praga,
forse non avrebbe con tanto zelo mandati alle fiamme que' novatori.
Rotto da Lutero il vincolo di suggezione al Papa ed ai preti in fatti
di religione, avvenne che anche quello che sommetteva il vassallo al
barone, il barone al imperadore si allentasse. Il popolo con la Bibbia
in mano era prete, vescovo, e papa; e se prima contristato della
prepotenza di chi gli soprastava, ricorreva al successore di San
Pietro, ora ricorreva a se stesso, avendogli commesse Fra Martino le
chiavi del regno dei Cieli.'--vol. ii. pp. 398, 9.
[372] It was not till the end of the eleventh century that
transubstantiation was definitely established as a dogma.
[373] See the passages quoted in note 113, p. 98; and note 132, p. 110.
[374] Henry VIII of England when he rebelled against the Pope called
himself King of Ireland (his predecessors had used only the title
'Dominus Hiberniæ') without asking the Emperor's permission, in order
to shew that he repudiated the temporal as well as the spiritual
dominion of Rome.
So the Statute of Appeals is careful to deny and reject the authority
of 'other foreign potentates,' meaning, no doubt, the Emperor as well
as the Pope.
[375] Matthias, brother of Rudolf II, reigned from 1612 till 1619.