§1
My discourse concerns true peace. I judge that this can scarcely be safe and enduring in Germany, my dearest country, among the diverse members of one Empire, without suspicions and offenses and without anxious expectation
of war, unless the importunate and furious madness of the ministers, especially the Calvinists, is restrained and reduced to measure in its calumniating and disturbing of everything. For they disturb ecclesiastical peace in such a way that they remove civil peace from the midst. There are many and most weighty reasons for proving this matter.
§2
The first reason. True religion and piety possess sharp goads and, when aided and ruled by divine grace, are victorious even over tortures and death. Superstition too is a vehement thing and, through its own timidity, headlong; when it grows strong, it engenders heresy and magic, always restless and, if opposed, savage. “All men,” says Cicero in the sixth action against Verres, “are moved by religion, and they judge that the ancestral gods whom they received from their forefathers must be diligently worshiped and retained by them.” All men without exception: not only those whom true piety joins to the true and only God who is to be worshiped, but also those whom error holds in bondage and charms with the images of false divinities, whom love of their own opinions blinds so that they do not behold the truth.
The cause is that all judge temporal or eternal salvation, and most judge both, to be at stake in a religious controversy. Therefore we see that, when religion is introduced, the populace is stirred up by the slightest impulse, and that seditions already stirred are composed by the same means. Peoples roar when they see a new religion imposed upon them, as recently at Berlin. Whenever they see religion changed, they believe that Christ is snatched from them, that they are delivered into the power of the demon, and that they are consigned to eternal fires—except where they have already become accustomed to changes and huckstering and hold faith among the adiaphora, dependent upon the will of their princes.
The preachers abuse this inclination of peoples and their zealous conviction, and they labor to bring everyone over to their own opinion: first by blandishments, then by general edicts and a change in the exercise and rites of the Church. How greatly did the Lutherans labor in the Palatinate to expel the Catholics? By what a fine stratagem did the Calvinists cast out the Lutherans? With what great anger did the Lutherans, returning from exile, proscribe the Calvinists? How skillfully did the proscribed Calvinists at last avenge themselves upon those who had proscribed them? And these things were transacted not by disputation alone, but by the authority and power of most illustrious princes.
In these disturbances, what confidence and charity could there be either among the Lutherans toward Frederick and Casimir or among the Calvinists toward Louis? Do they not judge those princes to be the enemies of their souls through whom they are most firmly persuaded that they are despoiled of true teachers and assigned to false teachers and seducers? Let the supplications of the citizens of Heidelberg to Casimir the Administrator be seen. Can it be that the Calvinists whom Louis the Elector expelled could have loved him and wished him to be powerful and secure? They cried that by his command and forces they themselves and the truth were oppressed, and they were persuaded that by his death salvation would return to them.
The ministers on either side, both Lutherans and Calvinists, each impelled the subjects toward his own opinion; they vociferated that a contest had been instituted concerning supreme salvation, concerning eternal life and death. They openly hated the opposing counselors and preachers, at whose instigation the princes changed religion. Would they love the prince without whom those men could do nothing? Would they love the prince who would give away the salvation of his subjects, and indeed their eternal salvation, to the desires of others? Since, therefore, from year to year and day to day the meddlesomeness and vanity of the preachers seeks a change of religion, there cannot fail to be as many causes of alienation, discord, and distrust as there are attempted changes. Luther changed religion; Melanchthon, Flacius Illyricus, Osiander, Major, and the Ubiquitarians altered it yet again after it was changed—all with disturbances and a convulsion of the parts of the Empire.
§3
The second reason. From that restless and perverse zeal of the ministers of the new Gospel arise a grave struggle and perpetual contentions. For what praiseworthy charity effects among the orthodox, that all should desire to come to knowledge of the truth, corrupted depravity attempts among tribunician agitators, so that they may infect everyone with their own contagion. Since they cannot do this by another way, despising mild remedies, they meditate exiles, confiscations, proscriptions, and tortures. The nine children of Arminius complain in a preface to the Estates of Holland that this occurs.
Let that sect which with more than human artifice feigns gentleness and innocence be our example. With what unbridled lust, with what barbarous cruelty did it exercise tyranny? How clearly did it demonstrate what madness lay hidden beneath the fleece of a gentle animal! What comparable deed did the infamous cruelty of the Arians or Circumcellions perpetrate? And yet that heresy, relying upon a single town, not only dared to hope for dominion over the world—which is excessively to the disgrace of the German nation—but, after sending envoys in every direction, attempted it.
To me, assuredly, that Anabaptist portent appeared not so marvelous when it decreed those crimes—for it had heretics and tyrants whom it might imitate—as when it applied itself with such ardor to the propagation of its sect. Every error possesses this quality, that it is fertile; every heretic is an importunate propagator of his opinion, and they do not easily cease unless they conquer. They all strive to dominate the body from which they have been cut off. They advance their hatreds with curses and, when they can, with the sword.
Behold within the Empire the soft Calvinists, the rigid Calvinists, the Socinians, Anabaptists of diverse superstitions, pure Lutherans, altered Lutherans, Ubiquitarians, Majorists, Osiandrians, and Flacians—all zealots of their own sect. There is no one among them who does not exceedingly desire the entire Empire to pass under the laws of his heresy, who does not attempt to accomplish this as far as he can. What peace, therefore, can there be when so many sects struggle with one another daily over life, fortunes, and the soul itself? Moderation must therefore be prescribed to the preachers, and precaution must be taken lest they bear and bring up some new monster.
Yet what would you prescribe to them? What laws would you establish? In the year 1530 the Augsburg Confession was presented to the Emperor Charles V, and many copies of it were then published. But how often was that confession changed? Indeed, how often did the assembled princes and cities act so that it would not be changed? Yet nothing was accomplished: one Melanchthon was more powerful than the whole body of Protestants. And so now no one maintains it intact.
§4
The third reason. Foreign kingdoms will perhaps be able for some time to sustain a diversity of religions without disturbances. But while this insolence of the ministers, especially the Calvinists, remains, the connection of the estates with one another and civil association in the Roman Empire cannot endure without fear of danger and without suspicion. For the preachers attempt altogether to remove the Empire from the midst under the pretext of religion.
The Roman Empire is no less within the Church than the Church is within the Empire; and if we wish to confess the truth,
the Empire in Germany exists through the Church. The principal members of the Empire possess their dignity because they are ecclesiastics. Three chancellorships of the Empire, and electorates, belong to churches. Therefore the peace of the Church is the peace of the Empire. The preachers who attempt to remove the ecclesiastical estate from the Empire therefore overthrow the Empire. But the Calvinist Puritans deny that bishops can be princes, and they proceed not only to snatch the government of their provinces from our bishops, but are also indignant with the English bishops because they obtain political dignities at the royal court.
They therefore remove the peace of the Empire, because from among so many archbishops, bishops, and abbots who are princes of the Empire by most ancient right, they acknowledge no one as a prince. They exhort their people to invade the sees of their colleagues as though they were vacant; they assert that this is not the least important head of their religion. This assuredly not only disturbs civil peace, but removes it altogether from the midst. Hence, when they wish, they will assail the emperor himself by the same art; for if those who elect him and proclaim the diets are not electors, then the election is not legitimate. Since these things are so, there is no doubt that the doctrine which labors, under the occasion of piety, to commit all the members of the Empire to a war of mutual destruction must be banished altogether from the territories of the Empire.
You will perhaps say that princes of a religion different from ours think otherwise. Deservedly so, indeed; they do not believe their own men, having often experienced them to be liars. But I do not consider what the generous spirit and prudence of the princes accomplish, but what whisperers—or, as the Lutherans call them in the history of the changed religion in the Palatinate, serpents—hiss into their ears. For what if at some time they obtain a prince upon whose youth they impose? Peace is not firm where the disposition and goodness of the prince, upon which alone it rests, are assailed by so many engines.
§5
The fourth reason. A state cannot be undisturbed where it is administered by contrary wills and laws; but the intemperance of the preachers makes the Empire such a state. There will be perpetual spiritual war; how, therefore, can there be temporal peace if spiritual war also afflicts it? To wit, will the laws of the Church call men to the sermon, to the celebration of the mysteries, to a procession, to prayers and fasts? What will a prince do here if he hears the preacher as a πάρεργον [secondary matter]? To wit, he will compel men to attend the court and the hunt, to repair roads, to cut wood, and to do other things by which they are altogether called away from the church.
Here, which lord will the conscience of the oppressed obey? For if a subject neglects the prince’s authority, political peace will now perish; if he postpones the law of the Church to the prince’s edict, conscience will totter. Let us make the matter clear by an example. Let the prince be a Calvinist, the superintendent a Lutheran. Let the latter threaten anathemas; the former, exiles, prisons, and the sword. Let each draw a portion of the people; when the pursuits of the populace have been split in opposite directions, civil peace must perish utterly.
The prince will pronounce Lutheran doctrine impious, a diabolical heresy, and the superintendent a turbulent enemy of the truth, to be pursued, exterminated, and cut down with all one’s strength. The superintendent will pronounce the prince’s commands tyrannical and his deeds cruel; he will earnestly await the aid of foreign Lutheran princes. Court and Church will collide; the ὑπερεπίσκοπος [super-bishop] will impel men toward the Lutherans, while the magistrate’s edict will compel them toward the Calvinists. The prince will not endure contempt of himself, nor indeed will the magistrate, who will be the more savage than so great a prince in proportion as his anger is more ignoble.
What remains here except that they bring forth arms, these men on behalf of the court and those on behalf of the church? If they obey the prince because religion has been commanded, it is worship not of God but of the purple, extorted from the unwilling. But what peace is there if you perceive that you are compelled to stake your life and salvation upon the prince’s opinion? Therefore that is not concord of minds, but the groaning of the oppressed, execration and hatred of the victor, and a hidden contrivance of minds intent upon vengeance.
§6
The fifth reason. We see daily examples of the Preachers’ War. For such is the constitution of the Roman Empire, such the intermixture of rights and jurisdictions, that it requires the highest concord between the ecclesiastical and political estates and can easily be torn apart by the machinations of turbulent men. Rights have been divided among different and often rival men, so that even when religion is one, peace can scarcely remain undisturbed. But now, when common rights and privileges are scattered among different religions, what convulsions of tribunals, what plagues of justice invade provinces with deadly contagion? How often are we compelled to see those disgraces of Germany?
This man possesses civil jurisdiction, that man ecclesiastical jurisdiction; another claims both. A Lutheran intrudes a Lutheran, a Calvinist a minister of his own communion; sometimes they do this by alternate turns. Hence come forcible installations, threatening convulsions, and, when the greater prelatures are at issue, bloody wars. Here there can be no concord of minds, no confederation, when with a savage and stern brow the preachers judge that every peace—indeed, any concession and inclination toward milder counsels—must be broken off as though contrary to conscience. Amid these things the most pitiable peoples, uncertain of everything, through the contest of those who rule bear an uncertain faith and a salvation held in suspense.
§7
The sixth reason. The Calvinist ministers bind civil and ecclesiastical peace by so inseparable a bond and association that, if the matter is conducted according to their judgment, they can by no means be separated. For they adorn their kings and princes with pontifical authority and power, so that spiritual power may serve political power and political power may support spiritual power. For they endow the principate with the faculty of judging and conducting spiritual affairs and arm ecclesiastical jurisdiction with the laws and army of the age, so that they come formidable with a twofold force.
Pareus, in his preface to Hosea, after he had conferred all the offices and power of bishops upon the most illustrious Prince of Hesse, animates and incites him with these words: “Well done, DIVINE Hero; boldly perform the work of the Lord which you are performing.” That is: expel the Lutherans; substitute Calvinists. For the prince was then doing this, and indeed in earnest. The Calvinists judge that their princes must act by this power, by this doubled force of both temple and court and, if there is resistance, of the camp.
Therefore those who impel civil power toward the alteration of affairs and drive it to strip its principal subjects of offices and revenues, cast them from possession, and order them to go into exile cannot preserve civil peace. For what peace can exist between the violence of those driving men out and the groaning and complaints of those who migrate? “But the people of Marburg did not move a war.” Prudently, assuredly: they were not ignorant that they were weaker. The Berliners, however, did move one, whether through sudden fury or because they hoped for victory. And at some time the people of Marburg will move one too, if what the Saxon counselors report is true: that all Lutherans
who live under Calvinists earnestly expect to be liberated by the estates of the Augsburg Confession. Motive 12. These are their words:
“The Protestants would enter upon slight favor—indeed, rather they would stir up execrations and groans against themselves among those who dwell among Calvinists and confidently and earnestly expect that they are shortly to be liberated by the estates of the Augsburg Confession and that Calvinism is to be abolished—if these men should perceive by hearing that the Protestants now play the same pipe with the Calvinists and concede that, as the saying goes, five is even. Once this was done, an occasion and cause would assuredly be furnished for no small disturbances and movements in the Church of God among Christians.”
The Lutherans who live among Calvinists therefore earnestly await liberation, and indeed liberation by the estates of the Augsburg Confession—a liberation which cannot occur without a violation of peace. They earnestly await the abolition of Calvinism; whether that abolition can occur without war, I leave to be discussed by the counselors of the princes. Conversely, the estates of the Augsburg Confession would groan and execrate them if they entered into peace with the Calvinists; therefore they now execrate the Calvinists and groan against them. That on account of which each thing is such is itself more such. The Lutherans living among Calvinists execrate the Lutheran estates on account of the Calvinists; therefore they execrate the Calvinists even more.
Finally, peace between Lutherans and Calvinists would furnish an occasion and cause for no small disturbances and movements. But why? Because by that peace the Lutherans would fall from their own hope and expectation and would therefore seek counsel and assistance from themselves. The matter has been brought to this point: if the preachers are left to themselves, not even mention of peace can be made without danger of war. Moreover, what should we think those men who execrate their princes and expect to be liberated from them will do if they obtain an opportunity?
Nor would I believe that the Saxon counselors say these things rashly and by conjecture concerning Lutherans living among Calvinists, but that they have discovered the matter from secret alliances and, as they now love to speak, correspondences. These are the Lutherans. Moreover, when these things are known, what should we suspect the Calvinists are contriving? Calvinist ministers so vigilant, so keen avengers of injuries, so cautious in anticipating dangers, so swift to forestall crimes, so practiced in deceiving Lutherans? This, assuredly: that they may abolish those who wait and every expectation, and that as quickly as possible, lest they delay their own security and lest there be time for aid to be brought to the confederates. Indeed, for this reason they will execute everything more savagely, lest they seem to be slow amid the dangers of their princes.
§8
The seventh reason. The ministers who today besiege the states which they call Evangelical, especially the Zwinglian states, endeavor by design to excite hatred and contempt of the Empire. These two causes are so effective for overthrowing the state that, unless God, the founder and guardian of order and magistrates, repressed their wicked and abominable endeavors, we would long ago have had no form of the Empire in Germany. Concerning the Anabaptists this shines forth more clearly than to require demonstration, for they attempt to wrest from all magistrates the sword which those magistrates do not carry in vain.
I demonstrate the matter concerning the Calvinists. Those men attempt to attach hatred and contempt to the Empire, and altogether to overthrow it, who teach the following consequences in words, writings, and, when they can, DEEDS:
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The Dragon, or Demon, gave the Empire his own strength and great power.
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The Church is necessarily afflicted by the Empire.
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The fullness of diabolism dwells in the Empire.
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The Empire which now exists is the seven-headed beast, Apocalypse 13:3.
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To marvel at the beast is to marvel at the success and felicity of the Empire while proclaiming it august, holy, sacrosanct, and immortal.
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The Dragon affixes his own ornaments to the Empire.
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To marvel excessively at the majesty and felicity of the Roman Empire is to adore the demon.
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While the pontiff defends the Empire, he retains men in the worship of the former apocalyptic beast.
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To adore the beast is nothing other than to wish the Empire to be sacrosanct, august, and venerable, as it formerly was under the gentiles.
But the Calvinists teach these things: Graserus in The Royal Plague, Benedictus Aretius on Apocalypse 13, and others.
By design, therefore, they attempt to overthrow the Roman Empire.
Therefore, unless those agitators and Gracchi are restrained, peace cannot be stable in the Roman Empire. The minor proposition is evident from their writings; I cited the places in the little book On the Increase of Heresies, to which I refer the reader. If anyone denies the major proposition, I do not doubt that all will judge him either insane or supremely shameless. Yet there is no need to prove it in any other way than by experience.
For if that doctrine is not insulting toward the August Caesars, if it is not seditious and exceedingly hostile to peace and concord, come then, let someone relate those things about other states after changing the name. Let him say that the Dragon or Demon gave his great power to the people of Zurich, the people of Bern, the Briton, the man of Bouillon, and the Dutch; that the Church is necessarily afflicted by them; that the fullness of diabolism dwells in them; that to marvel at the beast is to marvel at their success and felicity. Let him preach these and the other things at Zurich, Bern, London, Sedan, and The Hague, and publish them in print. Would not instruments of torture, stirred from the entire world, rush upon him? Would they not attempt to pour the Ocean itself through broken dikes upon that man as upon a pestilential torch of the state?
I scarcely seem safe to myself, who employ these examples for the sake of teaching—although what fault of mine is here? The Calvinists say these things against the Empire; I say that the statements are seditious, because if they were uttered against the Swiss, Dutch, and British, they would be judged seditious. Therefore they are also seditious when they are uttered against the emperors, electors, and princes of the Empire. That doctrine must therefore be removed if civil and ecclesiastical peace is sought. Those who show by these statements that their affairs cannot be safe except by the ruin of the Empire must not be tolerated.
§9
The eighth reason. What emperor, at last, or what prince at all could beasts of this kind endure? Of what profession or faith could he be? But I finish and conclude. The peace of the German state, the civil peace of the ruling nation, cannot stand unless a bridle is placed upon those disturbing ministers; or, if any peace is established, it will be brief, unsafe, untrustworthy, full of suspicions, hatreds, and enmities, and will not be far removed from war, since there is a certain perpetual expectation and preparation for war. This is for the sole reason that the Calvinist ministers, not content with present things and not tolerating the laws and common right, watch attentively for every occasion to increase their own affairs, entrap the Lutherans, and burn and devour the Catholics.