From one point of view the victory was not a great one. The only Confession tolerated was the Augsburg. The Swiss Reformation and its adherents were outside the scope of the religious peace. What grew to be the Reformed or Calvinistic Church was also outside. It was limited solely to the Lutheran, or, as it was called, the Evangelical creed. Nor was there much gain to the personal liberty of conscience. It may be said with truth that there was less freedom of conscience under the Lutheran territorial system of Churches, and also under the Roman Catholic Church reorganised under the canons and decrees of Trent, than there was in the mediæval Church.
The victory lay in this, that the first blow had been struck to free mankind from the fetters of Romanist absolutism; that the first faltering step had been taken on the road to religious liberty; and the first is valuable not for what it is in itself, but for what it represents and for what comes after it. The Religious Peace of Augsburg did not concede much according to modern standards; but it contained the potency and promise of the future. It is always the first step which counts.
Chapter VI. The Organisation Of Lutheran Churches.[372]
Two conceptions, the second being derived from the first, lay at the basis of everything which Luther said or did about the organisation of the Christian fellowship into churches.
The primary and cardinal doctrine, which was the foundation of everything, was the spiritual priesthood of all believers. This, he believed, implied that preaching, dispensing the sacraments, ecclesiastical discipline, and so forth were not the exclusive possession of a special caste of men to whom they had been committed by God, and who therefore were mediators between God and man. These divine duties belonged to the whole community as a fellowship of believing men and women; but as a division of labour was necessary, and as each individual Christian cannot undertake such duties without disorder ensuing, the community must seek out and set apart certain of its members to perform them in its name.
The second conception was that secular government is an ordinance ordained of God, and that the special rule claimed by the Roman Pontiff over things secular and sacred was a usurpation of the powers committed by God to the secular authority. This Luther understood to mean that the Christian magistracy might well represent the Christian community of believers, and, in its name or associated with it, undertake the organisation and superintendence of the Church civic or territorial.
In his earlier writings, penned before the outbreak of the Peasants' War, Luther dwells most on the thought of the community of believers, their rights and powers; in the later ones, when the fear of the common man had taken possession of him, the secular authority occupies his whole field of thought. But although, before the Peasants' War, Luther does not give such a fixed place to the secular magistracy as the one source of authority or supervision over the Church, the conception was in his mind from the first.