§ 1. The Limitations of the Peace of Augsburg

Book III.

The Reformed Churches.

Chapter I.

Introduction.

The Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) secured the legal recognition of the Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, and consequently within European polity. Henceforward States, which declared through their responsible rulers that they meant to live after the religion described in the Augsburg Confession, were admitted to the comity of nations, and the Pope was legally and practically debarred from excommunicating them, from placing them under interdict, and from inviting obedient neighbouring potentates to conquer and dispossess their sovereigns. The Bishop of Rome could no longer, according to the recognised custom of the Holy Roman Empire, launch a Bull against a Lutheran prince and expect to have its execution enforced as in earlier days. The Popes were naturally slow to see this, and had to be reminded of the altered state of matters more than once.

Of course, the exalted Romanist powers, civil and ecclesiastical, never meant this settlement to be lasting. They intrigued secretly among themselves, and fought openly, against it. The final determined effort to overthrow it was that hideous nightmare which goes by the name of the Thirty Years’ War, mainly caused by the determination of the Jesuits that by the help of God and the devil, for that, as Carlyle has remarked, was the peculiarity of the plan, all Germany must be brought back to the obedience of Holy Stepmother Church, and to submission to the Supreme Headship of the Holy Roman Empire—the Supreme Headship becoming more and more shadowy as the years passed. The settlement lasted, however, and remains in general outline until the present.

But the Religious Peace of Augsburg did not end the revolt against Rome which was simmering in every land in Western Europe. It made no provision for the multitude of believers in the Augsburg Confession, whose princes, for conscience’ sake or for worldly policy, remained steadfast to Rome, save that they were to be permitted to emigrate to territories where the rulers were of the same faith as theirs. These Lutherans were to be found in every part of Germany, and were very abundant in the Duchy of Austria. The statement of Faber, the Bishop of Vienna, that the only good Catholics in that city were himself and the Archduke Ferdinand, was, of course, rhetorical; but it is a proof of the numbers of the followers of Luther.

It chained irrevocably to the Romanist creed, by the clause called the ecclesiastical reservation, not merely the people, but the rulers in the numerous ecclesiastical principalities scattered all over Germany. This provision secured that if an ecclesiastical prince adopted the Lutheran faith, he was to be deprived of his principality. It is probable that this provision did more than anything else to secure for the Romanists the position they now have in Germany. It was partly due to the alarms excited by the fact that Albert of Brandenburg, Master of the Teutonic Knights, had secularised his land of East Prussia and had become a Lutheran, and by the narrow escape of the province of Köln from following in the same path, under its reforming archbishop, Hermann von Wied.

The Peace of Augsburg made no provision for any Protestants other than those who accepted the Augsburg Confession; and thousands in the Palatinate and all throughout South Germany preferred another type of Protestant faith. It is probable that, had Luther lived for ten or fifteen years longer, the great division between the Reformed or Calvinist and the Evangelical or Lutheran Churches would have been bridged over; but after his death his successors, intent to maintain, as they expressed it, the deposit of truth which Luther had left, actually ostracised Melanchthon for his endeavour to heal the breach. The consequence was that the Lutheran Church within Germany after 1555 lost large districts to the Reformed Church.

Under Elector Frederick III., surnamed the Pious, the territorial Church of the Palatinate separated from the circle of Lutheran Churches, and in 1563 the Heidelberg Catechism was published. This celebrated doctrinal formula at once became, and has remained, the distinctive creed of the various branches of the Reformed Church within Germany; and its influence extended even farther.

Bremen followed the example of the Palatinate in 1568. Its divines published a doctrinal Declaration in 1572, and a more lengthy Consensus Bremenensis in 1595. Anhalt, under its ruler John George (1587-1603), did away with the consistorial system of Church government, and abandoned the use of Luther’s Catechism. Hesse-Cassel joined the circle of German Reformed Churches in 1605. These examples were followed in many smaller principalities, most of which, imitating all the Reformed Churches, published separate and distinctive confessions of faith, which were nevertheless supposed to contain the sum and substance of the common Reformed creed.

These German principalities, rulers and inhabitants, placed themselves deliberately outside the protection of the Religious Peace of Augsburg. The fundamental principles of their faith were not very different from the Lutheran, but they were important enough to make them forego the protection which the treaty afforded. Setting aside minor differences and sentiments, perhaps more powerful than doctrines, their separation from neighbouring Protestants was based on their objection to the doctrine of Ubiquity, essential to the Lutheran theory of the Sacrament of the Supper, and to the consistorial system of ecclesiastical government. They repudiated the two portions of the Lutheran system which were derived professedly from the mediæval Church, and insisted on basing their exposition of doctrine and their scheme of ecclesiastical government more directly on the Word of God. They had come in contact with another reformation movement, had recognised its sturdier principles, and had become so enamoured of them that they felt compelled to leave the Lutheran Church for the Reformed.

Still confining ourselves to Germany, it is to be noticed that the Augsburg Confession ostentatiously and over and over again separated those who accepted it from protesters against the mediæval Church, who were called Anabaptists. It repudiated views supposed to be held by them on Baptism, the Holy Scripture, the possibility of a life of sinless perfection, and the relation of Christian men to the magistracy. In some of the truces arranged between the Emperor and the evangelical princes,—truces which anticipated the religious Peace of Augsburg,—attempts were made to induce Lutherans and Romanists to unite in suppressing those sectaries. It is needless to say that they were not included in the settlement in 1555. Yet they had spread all over Germany, endured with constancy bloody persecutions, and from them have come the large and influential Baptist Churches in Europe and America. From beginning to end they were outside the Lutheran Reformation.