righteousness; and that the works of justified men consummate justification, and deserve eternal life"-a statement subversive of the true scriptural doctrine. A. D. 1546. The conferences did not begin till the twenty- broken off. seventh of January, and by the middle of February the emperor signed, at Utrecht, those orders concerning the management of them which brought them to an end. He would have no minutes taken except by persons appointed by the presidents, (all of them hostile to the protestants,) and those minutes to be very brief; and he required every one present to take an oath, to reveal nothing that passed to any human being, till the result should have been submitted to him and the states of the empire, and leave obtained from them. These orders were supposed to have been drawn up at Ratisbon, and transmitted to the emperor for his sanction. Conferences had previously taken place during three days, without form, and without notes being made of what passed: but the presidents themselves saw that the practice was open to great abuse, and they would not allow it to be continued. To this laxity of proceeding Seckendorf doubts not we are to trace the insulting stories which the papists circulated, and some of which Maimbourg has adopted.―The withholding of all communication of what passed was expressly contrary to the commission under which the protestant deputies were acting, which required them regularly to report to their principals; and they accordingly refused the engagement required of them: and, having, by order of their princes, entered their protest against this and other impositions, they in the 1 Sleid. 359. CHAP. VIII. Remarks of Diet of course of the following month successively quitted Ratisbon. At this the emperor expressed great displeasure in the ensuing diet; but it may be observed, that the bishop of Aichstadt himself had set them the example, though he left a written apology for his departure. Cochlæus, (who had been one of the presidents,) in a book which he published, pronounced the princes, divines, and all concerned on the protestant side, to be " apostates, rebels, and heretics, and that they ought to be proceeded against accordingly:" and Pallavicini says, "Torches were wanting here, not to illuminate the protestants but to burn them, for they erred not from darkness of understanding, but from depravity of heart."2 Father Paul's remark, however is, that "the conference was dissolved by the arts of the catholics, and the deceitful pretences of the emperor." 3 Concerning the diet of Ratisbon nothing more need here be added. On the emperor's conduct we may remark, that the meanness, deceit, and tyranny, by which it was characterized, are in the highest degree offensive to every sentiment of honour and justice. Yet all is justified, and even applauded, both by Pallavicini and Maimbourg, because it was to serve the church! But "it belongs," says Seckendorf, "to their school, who hesitate not to prefer the useful to the right, and who maintain that truth is not to be observed in dealing with heretics, where it may be of advantage to the church to Subsequent disregard it."4 Nothing could have been more agrecable to our feelings, than to have seen events. 1 Sleid. 459, 460. Seck. iii. 626---628. 2 Pallav. vi. 9. 4 Seck. iii. 551, 552, 618. 3 Seck. iii. 628, 661. Charles, after all his artifice and contrivance, taken unprepared, and defeated at the head of the troops which he had got together, and the forces of his prompter, the pope, cut off before they could reach the scene of action; all which had well nigh taken place, and, humanly speaking, might easily have been effected. Thus the liberty of Germany might have been established, and the protestant religion placed in security. This would have exactly met our wishes: but to that higher Wisdom which controls all occurrences, and watches with an eye of special regard over the affairs of the church, it seemed good to permit a widely different course of events. It pleased Him, indeed, ultimately to establish the cause of the German protestants in safety: but, according to the anticipations which we have repeatedly seen the leading reformers entertaining, their church was to be previously humbled and purified. It was His good pleasure also to bring down the pride, and to disappoint the ambition of Charles V, as effectually, and in as mortifying a manner, as if it had been accomplished by the elector and the landgrave; but it was to be by the hand of a man of far less principle than either of them, whom the emperor himself was, with the most unsuspecting confidence, nourishing up to execute both these great designs of providence.-Here then we are strikingly taught to commit our ways to God, to leave all with him, and in faith and patience to wait the unfolding of His dispensations, who will infallibly bring about the events most to be desired, in the time and by the means which are the best to be chosen. A. D. 1546. Elector. Such were, in fact, the sentiments with which Piety of the the pious elector of Saxony received the news of the emperor's virtual denunciation of him, CHAP. Remarks on son's repre ant Leaders. as a rebel, whom he would forthwith proceed to punish as he deserved. In directing his deputies quietly to withdraw from Ratisbon, he said, He had merited no such treatment from the emperor's hands; that, whatever might be pretended, his religion was the real cause of it; and that he committed the event to God, who would undoubtedly direct the whole to the glory of his own name. By his grace," he added, "I have resolved to persevere even to the end in the confession of his word and truth, though it should be at the risque of my person, my life, and all that I possess."-He rejoiced to hear that the confederates were not dispirited; he relied on the divine aid; and, in conjunction with the landgrave, resolved to do every thing in his power for the common cause.1 But the representation, which Dr. Robertson makes of the protestant leaders, appears to call sentation of for some remarks. Occasions of jealousy and the Protest- discord had no doubt arisen, and their union was by no means so entire as might have been wished: but Dr. Robertson's statement, I think, is suited to make a much stronger impression upon this subject, than the authors to whom he refers produce. Particularly he seems to convey too unfavourable an idea of the elector of Saxony, as compared with the landgrave, and too nearly to concur in the opinion which he represents the latter as entertaining of the former, namely, that, however "upright" a man he might be, he was "fettered by narrow prejudices, unworthy of a prince called to act a chief part in a scene of such importance." Now, no doubt, as a general, a politician, a man of the world, the landgrave might be much the 1 Seck. iii, 663. elector's superior: but in all other respects there could be no comparison between the two characters. For deliberate wisdom, for sound judgment, and above all for piety and virtue; for the qualities which fitted him to be the head of a religious association, previously to a state of actual warfare, and to do honour to the body whose counsels he regulated; I conceive the elector must decidedly bear away the palm. It is true, his attachment to every tenet and portion of Lutheranism might be carried to excess -might be what many, with Dr. Robertson, would call it, "bigoted and superstitious:" but it was not a blind attachment: he had closely studied what he thus firmly embraced; and his adherence to it was the result of conscientious conviction; and likewise of a just apprehension of the difficulty of knowing where to stop, if once we begin to give way in such questions, and in such times, as those in which he was conversant. And, if he did think, "that the concerns of religion are to be regulated by principles and maxims-different from those" by which "the common affairs of life" are, in point of fact, at least, usually managed, is he much to be blamed for this opinion?-Luther was not on all occasions thought, either by his friends or his enemies, to be so much a "stranger to the rules of political conduct," as is here supposed: the latter sometimes bring charges of an opposite nature against him.-That either the elector or Luther should have refused to unite with the reformed Swiss, on account of their difference from them on the subject of the eucharist, (I remember no other material article, much less " several essential articles of faith," on which they differed,) must be again lamented, as a humbling instance of the weak A. D. 1546. |