From Metz, where the preacher Guillaume Farel was working for the Reformation, an application was received for admission into the Schmalkalden League. The Lutherans there received at least moral support from Melanchthon who, in the name of the League, addressed a writing to the Duke of Lorraine. Not only distant Transylvania, but even Venice, held correspondence with Luther in order to obtain from him advice and instructions concerning the Protestant congregations already existing in those regions.
Thus the author of the religious upheaval might well congratulate himself, when, in the evening of his days, he surveyed the widespread influence of his work.
He was at the same time well aware what a potent factor in all this progress was the danger which menaced Germany from the Turks. The Protestant Estates continued to exploit the distress of the Empire to their own advantage in a spirit far from loyal. They insisted on the Emperor’s granting their demands within the Empire before they would promise effectual aid against the foe without; their conduct was quite inexcusable at such a time, when a new attack on Vienna was momentarily apprehended, and when the King of France was quite openly supporting the Turks.
In the meantime as a result of the negotiations an Imperial army was raised and Luther published his prudent “Vermanunge zum Gebet wider den Türcken.” In this he advised the princes to do their duty both towards God and the Evangel and towards the Empire by defending it against the foe. The Pope is as much an enemy as the Turk, and the world has reached its close, for the last Judgment is at hand.[600]
The Emperor found it advisable to show himself even more lenient than before; the violent encroachments of the Protestants, which so unexpectedly strengthened their position, were allowed to pass unresisted; the ecclesiastical and temporal penalties pronounced against the promoters of the innovations remained a dead letter, and for the time being the Church property was left in their hands. At the Diet of Spires, in 1544, the settlement was deferred to a General Council which the Reichsabschied describes as a “Free Christian Council within the German Nation.”
As was only to be expected, Paul III, the supreme head of Christendom, energetically protested against such a decision. With dignity, and in the supreme consciousness of his rights and position, the Pope reminded the Emperor that a Council had long since been summoned (above, vol. iii., p. 424) and was only being delayed on account of the war. It did not become the civil power, nor even the Emperor, to inaugurate the religious settlement, least of all at the expense of the rights of Church and Pope as had been the case; to the Vicar of Christ and the assembly summoned by him it fell to secure the unity of the Church and to lay down the conditions of reunion; yet the civil power had left the Pope in the lurch in his previous endeavours to summon a Council and to establish peace in Germany; “God was his witness that he had nothing more at heart than to see the whole of the noble German people reunited in faith and all charity”; “willingly would he spend life and blood, as his conscience bore him witness, in the attempt to bring this about in the right way.”[601]
These admonitions fell on deaf ears, as the evil work was already done. The consent, which, by dint of defiance and determination, the Protestant princes wrung from Empire and Emperor, secured the triumph of the religious revolution in ever wider circles.
[2. Sad Forebodings]
In spite of all his outward success, Luther, at the height of his triumph, was filled with melancholy forebodings concerning the future of his work.