092: THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1580.
had become the protest of princes and representatives of leading cities of the empire, who now for the first time appeared as an organized party. It was a protest of conscience bound in the Word of God against tyrannical authority.
The appeal was not entertained. The Emperor, who soon afterwards concluded peace with the Pope (June 29, 1529), and with the King of France (Aug. 5), refused even to grant the delegation of the Protestant States a respectful hearing at Piacenza (September), and kept them prisoners for a while.
From this protest and appeal the Lutherans were called Protestants ; with good reason, if we look at their attitude to Rome, which remains the same to this day. It is the duty of the church at all times to protest against. sin, error, corruption, tyranny, and every kind of iniquity. But the designation, which has since become a general term for evangelical Christians, is negative, and admits of an indiscriminate application to all who dissent from popery, no matter on what grounds and to what extent. It must be supplemented by the more important positive designation Evangelical. The gospel of Christ, as laid down in the New Testament, and proclaimed again in its primitive purity and power by the Reformation, is the basis of historical Protestantism, and gives it vitality and permanency. The protest of Speier was based objectively upon the Word of God, subjectively upon the right of private judgment and conscience, and historically upon the liberal decision of the Diet of 1526."
1 ΤΊ is remarkable that one of the most conservative branches of Protestant Christendom, ‘‘ the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America,’’ adopted the term as a part of its official title when, after the Revolutionary War, it assumed an independent organization. This could not be done in the state of churchly sentiment which has since come to prevail in that church. Vigorous efforts have been made within the last few years to get rid of the term Protestant, and to substitute for it Catholic, or American, or some other more or less presumptuous epithet, but without success so far. - The secession from this body which was organized in 1873 took the name of ‘The Reformed Episcopal Church.”
§ 116. RECONCILIATION OF EMPEROR AND POPE. 098
Unfortunately, the moral force of the protest of Speier was soon weakened by dissensions among the signers. Luther
and Melanchthon, who at that time were quite agreed on the | eucharistic question, seriously objected to all political and | military alliances, and especially to an alliance with the |
Zwinglians, whom they abhorred as heretics.! They prevented vigorous measures of defense. Philip of Hesse, who was in full political, and in half theological, sympathy with the Swiss and Zwinglians, brought about in October of the same year the conference at Marburg in the hope of healing the Protestant schism: but the conference failed of its main object, and Protestantism had to carry on the conflict with Rome as a broken army.
δ 116. The Reconciliation of the Emperor and the Pope. The Crowning of the Emperor. 1529.
The Emperor expressed to the Pope his deep regret at the sacking of the holy city. His breach with him was purely political and temporary. The French troops again entered Lombardy. Henry VIII. of England sympathized with Francis and the Pope. The Spanish counselors of Charles represented to him that the imprisonment of the vicar of Christ was inconsistent with the traditional loyalty of Spain to the holy see.
On Nov. 26, 1527, the Emperor concluded an agreement with the Pope by which he was released from confinement, and reinstated in his temporal power (except over a few forti: fied places), on promise of paying the soldiers, and convening a council for the reformation of the church. For a while Clement distrusted the Emperor, and continued his Franco- Italian policy; but at last they definitely made peace, June 29, 1529. The Pope acknowledged the sovereignty of the
1 In a letter to Elector John, May 22, 1529 (De Wette, III. 455), Luther
went so far as to call the Zwinglians ‘‘audacious enemies of God and his Word, who fight against God and the sacrament,.’’