§1
There are many writings and decrees of the Lutherans against Syncretism with the Zwinglians. Among them the adversary especially undertook to attack one, which belongs to the Saxon preachers and counselors, whom he insultingly calls court Stentors. They advise their princes not to conspire with Calvinists against the Pontiff, Emperor, kings, and Catholic princes, but rather to join themselves to the Emperor and Catholics; and for this matter they briefly and wisely included nineteen reasons, which they call motives. Pareus snarls against their counsel in these words in Chapter 19:
“But indeed it has been discovered that another hindrance, equally insidious and pestilential, creeps through the courts of certain princes. For certain MOTIVES circulate under this title: Motiven und Ursachen, warumb man mit den Calvinisten in Religions Sachen nichts kan oder soll wider die Papisten für einen Mann stehen; that is, reasons why Lutheran princes can and ought neither to stand together with Calvinists in the business of religion against the Papists. This pestilential hindrance, I say, undoubtedly distracts the minds of most praiseworthy princes and cities in various ways and disturbs counsels of peace. Therefore the matter demands that we briefly examine whether those motives or reasons are true and so solid that they ought to stir up troubles among the Evangelical churches and overturn peace. There are nineteen reasons, which, retaining the term ‘motives,’ I shall report in order, and I shall openly and calmly, without any irritation, append what the orthodox answer to each.”
He also shows in the dedicatory letter to the Eucharistic Controversies the reasons which especially moved those counselors. In it, an old man among Polish youths, he accuses the Lutherans in this manner: “But whatever is said here about the Lutherans is said concerning our adversaries in Germany—the rigid Ubiquitarians, savage and turbulent enemies of truth, who admit no conditions of peace unless their Ubiquity and Majesty are preserved; who represent and condemn the orthodox as heretics worse than the Turks themselves; and who openly profess that one ought rather to pass over to the Papists than cultivate fraternity with the orthodox, whom they call Calvinists. From among them a certain court Stentor recently was not ashamed in a public writing to counsel his prince that in the diets he should join himself to the Papists rather than the orthodox Calvinists, adducing two reasons. One was theological: that the Lutherans agree with the Papists in more matters than with the Calvinists, whom he names. The other was civil: that the Pope contributes his strength to protect the Roman Empire, while the Calvinist princes openly act in collusion with the Turk against the Empire. The latter reason deserves to be refuted in a very different way than by my pen. If the former is true, truth itself has become a lie—unless perhaps, just as he numbers genuflection at the name of Jesus among the heads of agreement, which the orthodox account indifferent, so he numbers among them statues in churches, organs, Phrygian chasubles and stoles, flowing gowns, curled hair, dances, church dedications, and many things of that kind, which these and those possess in common. If the counsel is upright, why did Luther write that the Papacy is from the Devil—Dass das Papsttum vom Teufel gestiftet sei? Why does the Apostle cry: ‘Come out of her, my people’?”
§2
They later divided the two reasons I reported into nineteen when it seemed good to explain everything individually. For neither are princes so frivolous or so neglectful of public safety and honor, nor do they employ counselors so inexperienced or so corrupted into perfidy by Calvinist money and promises, that they would bring their resources, liberty, life, and the safety of their subjects into danger for the domination of the Calvinists. Much less are they so foolish as to permit themselves to be ruled by Calvinist ministers.
Since princes profess these things without fear and dissimulation, there is no danger that at the will of a bloodthirsty Calvinist they would wish to be cruel toward their colleagues. For what prince of German blood and spirit would endure being hired for the slaughter of Catholics by a most shameful Syncretism? Who would lease his prison service to this gladiatorial trainer? What more monstrous thing could they do to incur hatred for their wickedness, or what more unworthy insult to their ancestors, than to hasten to slaughter and devour neighboring, quiet, friendly, and related princes because they practice that religion in which all those from whom they themselves received nobility, riches, and dominion were born and died?
Is anyone so savage that he would wish to contaminate himself by killing the living, whose only crime is that they follow his ancestors—from whose nobility he is highborn and from whose inheritance he is powerful? Would he employ against them the same cruelty by which, in the torments of others, he shows what he judges his own fathers to have deserved? Will you kill me, most illustrious prince? Will you devour me after I have been killed? Will you die from joy in my torments because I did not depart from the religion of your grandfathers and great-grandfathers; because I serve at the altar which your ancestors founded; because I believe what they gave me cause to believe; because I do not condemn that to which they wished their teachers and academies to swear? Behold, my blood flows to your odium and the disgrace of your family. Therefore it is necessary that either you assume a more benign disposition toward me or consign almost your whole family and antiquity to the flames.
§3
Concerning the free cities of the Empire, without whose strength the madness of the preachers cannot set war in motion, I judge there to be still less reason for fear. They abhor contention and blood, flourish through commerce and the exercise of arts, and cannot grow by war; for they experience that through it the fortunes of private persons are diminished and commerce halted, nor is there hope that a state enclosed among the empires and dominions of more powerful men can extend its boundaries.
§4
Who, therefore, will sound the trumpet at the voice of tribunician madness? Who will bring it about that Europe, dashed against itself in civil war, turns the remnants of its fortunes and its mangled members into plunder for the Mohammedans? This is Pareus’s undertaking. He counsels so atrociously concerning us that he judges the delay by which our slaughter is deferred to be AN EQUALLY INSIDIOUS AND PESTILENTIAL HINDRANCE. It is too much for him that the Pontiff, Caesar, kings, and Catholic princes are alive. Surely to one for whom delay is insidious and pestilential, the acceleration of death must be safe, salutary, and religious.
They recognize the gentleness of Calvin and Beza; nor do I marvel at the savagery of the court preacher about whom the History of the Religion Changed in the Palatinate relates that, speaking in the women’s quarters concerning the fifth change, he said that if he were Caesar he would cut off the head of every Lutheran preacher.
Yet if the worse party should someday prevail; if Evangelical ministers, burning from the cautery of their patriarch, should fly about amid a column of armed men; if they should smear the books they wrote in blood with the gore of martyrs; if Calvinist-Lutheran camps should stand against us, our helper is in heaven. Our heart will not fear. We shall spend upon religion the death which we owe to nature; we shall return to Christ the life which we cannot retain. It is not wretched, not even bitter, to die for Christ. More wretched are those whose cruelty we shall undergo.
We shall possess as witness of our innocence the same man who invades our fortunes and takes away our life: the Lutheran soldier, who, although he performs an infamous service for the Calvinists, nevertheless will not be able to deny that he fights for the scales of the Devil. Nor can he be ignorant that it is a great good which embodied devils—as Luther in his Table Talk calls the Zwinglians—hate so bitterly and persecute so atrociously. Therefore let us all be prepared for combat and martyrdom, destined to fall happily if, by permission of eternal providence, success answers the hostile attempt. Happily destined to fall, I say, beneath whom almighty God will place his hand, so that death itself may implant us into the life for which God exalted his only-begotten Son and gave him the name which is above every name.
If we bring this pious meditation on death and blessedness to every vicissitude of the times, we shall neither fear the adversaries’ threats nor tremble at the daily reports of wars and the semiannual histories which their forgers most mendaciously compose. Nor shall we be excessively raised up by the consolation which honorable men, experienced in the state, bring. For there are men neither of the lowest rank nor little practiced in the affairs of the Empire who deny that that conspiracy should be feared even if it is most successfully accomplished. They say that God will not fail the most just cause of the Catholics; that he is the avenger of justice; that efficacious means for justice against wickedness and audacity are not lacking to the lawful magistrate; that they know where the shoe pinches the adversaries; that the mortality by which they can fall is common to them and us; that iron battle lines stand on feet of clay; that immense structures turn upon a slender hinge; and that blood will follow from our wound too.
§5
I have thus far been accustomed to approve their counsels in order to indicate that human aids and industry, since they are divine gifts, are not to be despised. Yet I gladly demonstrate a more excellent way of Christian perfection, constancy, and glory, and exhort men to seek triumphs in the heavenly Capitol more willingly by suffering than by acting bravely, by meeting death than by killing the enemy.
If we await war with this disposition, we shall obtain one of two things: either, by dying in the faith and communion of the ancient martyrs, we shall obtain the same laurel in which they rejoice, crowned eternally; or, if God grants victory to the just cause, if that great weigher of counsels and great arbiter of wars obstructs the conspiracy, we shall live in our ancestral religion without the tumult of innovators and persecution by enemies. O happy lot of the Christian soul, for which a longer life is a road to felicity and death a shortcut, and which cannot perish except by its own will!