Already on two occasions the diet had wished to make the reform of the Church a national work; the Emperor, the Pope, and a few princes were opposed to it; the Diet of Spire had therefore resigned to each state the task that it could not accomplish itself.
But what constitution were they about to substitute for the papal hierarchy?
They could, while suppressing the Pope, preserve the Episcopal order: it was the form most approximate to that which was on the point of being destroyed.
They might, on the contrary, reconstruct the ecclesiastical order, by having recourse to the sovereignty of God's Word, and by re-establishing the rights of the christian people. This form was the most remote from the Roman hierarchy. Between these two extremes there were several middle courses.
PHILIP OF HESSE.
The latter plan was Zwingle's; but the reformer of Zurich had not fully carried it out. He had not called upon the christian people to exercise the sovereignty, and had stopped at the council of two hundred as representing the Church.[61]
The step before which Zwingle had hesitated might be taken, and it was so. A prince did not shrink from what had alarmed even republics. Evangelical Germany, at the moment in which she began to try her hand on ecclesiastical constitutions, began with that which trenched the deepest on the papal monarchy.
It was not, however, from Germany that such a system could proceed. If the aristocratic England was destined to cling to the episcopal form, the docile Germany was destined the rather to stop in a governmental medium. The democratic extreme issued from Switzerland and France. One of Calvin's predecessors then hoisted that flag which the powerful arm of the Genevese Reformer was to lift again in after-years and plant in France, Switzerland, Holland, Scotland, and even in England, whence it was a century later to cross the Atlantic and summon North America to take its rank among the nations.
None of the evangelical princes was so enterprising as Philip of Hesse, who has been compared to Philip of Macedon in subtlety, and to his son Alexander in courage. Philip comprehended that religion was at length acquiring its due importance; and far from opposing the great development that was agitating the people, he put himself in harmony with the new ideas.
The morning-star had risen for Hesse almost at the same time as for Saxony. In 1517, when Luther was preaching in Wittemberg the gratuitous remission of sins, men and women were seen in Marburg repairing secretly to one of the ditches of the city, and there, near a solitary loophole, listening to the words that issued from within, and that preached doctrines of consolation through the bars. It was the voice of the Franciscan, James Limburg, who having declared that, for fifteen centuries, the priests had falsified the Gospel of Christ, had been thrown into this gloomy dungeon. These mysterious assemblies lasted a fortnight. On a sudden the voice ceased; these lonely meetings had been discovered, and the Franciscan, torn from his cell, had been hurried away across the Lahnberg towards some unknown spot. Not far from the Ziegenberg, some weeping citizens of Marburg came up with him, and hastily snatching aside the canvass that covered his car, they asked him, "Whither are you going?" "Where God wills," calmly replied the friar.[62] There was no more talk of him, and it is not known what became of him. These disappearances are usual in the Papacy.