§1
It would not be difficult to persuade them of this, provided that the name of the Pontiff and hatred of Catholics were absent. Now, alas, envy, anger, and avarice dispute concerning religion with such injustice that they carry the teachers to heaven but persecute the disciples with condemnation, exile, prison, and sword. Let this cataract of alienated minds be removed, and Germany will receive the Council no more reluctantly than the other parts of Europe. For why should it not receive that which it has so often desired and which it holds through its better part? Certainly the princes, as they speak in the preface to the Augsburg Confession, request a general council. These are their words:
“Since Your Imperial Majesty has also, not once but often, graciously signified to the Electors, Princes, and remaining Estates of the Empire, and at the Diet of Speyer which was held in the year of the Lord 1526 caused it to be recited and publicly read according to the given and prescribed form of your imperial instruction and commission, that Your Majesty, for certain causes alleged in Your Majesty’s name, did not wish to determine anything in this business of religion and could not conclude anything, but according to the office of Your Imperial Majesty would diligently endeavor with the Roman Pontiff concerning the convocation of a general council—just as the same thing was set forth more fully a year ago at the most recent public assembly convened at Speyer. There Your Imperial Majesty, through Lord Ferdinand, King of Bohemia and Hungary, our friend and gracious lord, and then through the imperial orator and commissioners, caused these things, among others, to be proposed: that Your Imperial Majesty had understood and considered the deliberation of Your Imperial Majesty’s lieutenant in the Empire, and of the president and counselors in the government, and of the legates from the other Estates who had assembled at Regensburg, concerning the convocation of a council;
and that Your Imperial Majesty judged it useful that a council be convoked; and because the causes which were then being treated between Your Imperial Majesty and the Roman Pontiff were near to concord and Christian reconciliation, Your Imperial Majesty did not doubt that the Roman Pontiff could be induced to hold a general council. Your Imperial Majesty therefore signified that you would endeavor that the aforesaid Supreme Pontiff, together with Your Imperial Majesty, should consent to assemble such a general council, to be announced at the earliest time by public letters.
“In the event, therefore, that in the cause of religion the dissensions between us and the parties have not been composed amicably and in charity, we now offer ourselves here before Your Imperial Majesty in all obedience, superabundantly prepared to appear and plead the cause in such a general and free council. Concerning its convocation, in all the Imperial Diets that have been held during the years of Your Imperial Majesty’s reign, it has always been treated concordantly by the Electors, Princes, and remaining Estates of the Empire and concluded by agreeing votes.
“To the assembly of this General Council, and at the same time to Your Imperial Majesty, in this by far greatest and gravest cause, we have already appealed beforehand in the proper manner and form of law, and we now appeal. We still adhere to this appeal to Your Imperial Majesty and at the same time to the Council, nor do we intend or have power to abandon it through this or another negotiation—unless the cause between us and the parties, according to the tenor of the most recent imperial citation, has been composed amicably in charity, quieted, and reduced to Christian concord. Concerning this we here also protest solemnly and publicly.”
§2
It is true. For in the year 1524 a council was requested in earnest; business was conducted with the pontifical legates then present at Nuremberg so that, with the Emperor consenting, the Pontiff might proclaim a council. All things thereafter were directed to this end: at Speyer in 1526 and 1529; at Augsburg in 1530; at Regensburg in 1532 and 1541; at Speyer in 1542 and 1544; at Worms in 1545; at Augsburg in 1548, where the Emperor also proposed certain articles to endure until a General Synod; and again at Augsburg in 1551. These things were done, and either the judgment of the Council was awaited or the business was certainly conducted with little German candor.
The Emperor himself is witness in the recess of Regensburg in 1546. His words are: “His Imperial Majesty, in response to the humble prayers and petitions of the Estates, obtained and procured through various negotiations that at last a General Council should be established and begun at Trent, a city of the German nation.” Concerning the same Council the same Emperor Charles V says: “The General Council, to which all the Estates of the Holy Roman Empire have subjected themselves, will without doubt apply pious and zealous diligence so that, in this cause, provision may be made for the consciences of many men and for the peace of the Catholic Church, as necessity requires.”
Why, therefore, do men evilly curious, enemies of peace, now draw the princes and Estates away not only from the Council but also from the former opinion which they laid before the Council, and cast them into Calvinisms, Osiandrisms, and Socinianisms?
§3
All assemblies of the Empire, all diets, all public meetings demand peace—peace, I say, especially the cities and princes who neither hope nor desire to grow through war. Even those who trust that they will be safe only when affairs are disturbed pretend peace. But they will be able to obtain neither political nor ecclesiastical peace except by approving and accepting the Council of Trent.
How often now, after the well-known variations of religions, and at how great an expense, do they seek civil peace and quiet? But they have not yet obtained it; rivalries and enmities grow stronger each year. For since the Council’s decrees have been received by foreign nations with great applause and approval, and since the nobler part of Germany follows them, what peace will those men be able to possess whom a solitary and obstinate opinion divides from the rest of the Christian world and from their own colleagues—an opinion by which they judge that they alone think rightly, while the rest are impious, blasphemous idolaters? This is all the more so because no peace and agreement has hitherto been able to be established even among themselves.
§4
In the year 1557 four ways to peace were proposed in the recess or decree of the Empire: a General Council, a National Council, a Colloquy, and an Assembly of the Empire. All the princes confess by their decree that a national council and an assembly of the Empire are useless for religious concord. They determine that a General Council is the most orderly and correct way to peace; that it has descended from antiquity through the Christian Church to the present time; and that it is without controversy the best, most useful, and most advantageous way—the way which the Church has employed in similar cases and dissensions and by which it has happily decided causes. Every care must therefore be devoted to making it possible for a General Council to be assembled.
Meanwhile they propose a colloquy because they had no hope of a Council. But experience has now taught that no colloquy is sufficient for peace, nor can one be. For they establish a colloquy as a consultation and deliberation in which every negotiation undertaken is conducted without obligation and without prejudice and contains no confession, decision, determination, or definition. Since, therefore, peace has not been made by a colloquy and, as affairs have now been settled, cannot be made by one, a Council is necessary—and indeed the one which the whole world has now embraced.
I have often taught that the adversaries cannot possess such a council. Matthias Hoe, supreme preacher at the Saxon court, proves this expressly: “Moreover, if we consider what a general council requires, all will confess and say that it is impossible for such a council to be instituted.” He adduces arguments: because it must be assembled by imperial authority, and the Emperor will not do this; second, because theologians cannot be compelled to attend the Council and expenses are lacking. They will therefore never obtain solid peace, but will pass from errors into other and still other errors unless they join themselves to the Universality. Domestic peace is weak if the whole city is afflicted by seditions.
§5
The Roman Empire, as I taught above, cannot subsist without ecclesiastical peace. Its civil laws are not only now tempered by the canons of councils and pontiffs, but were so formerly, when the German nation did not yet rule: “The laws of the age do not disdain to follow the sacred canons,” in the Authentic, That Clerics Be Judged before Their Own Bishops, penultimate section, Collection 6. Unless, therefore, the Council is received, the conflict between ecclesiastical laws and the new civil laws will be perpetual, as I showed elsewhere, and consequently there will be no peace.
§6
Following the example of their head, it is fitting that all the Estates of the Empire, as members, should receive the Council’s saving doctrine and reformation willingly and with a grateful mind. But Charles, Ferdinand, Maximilian, Rudolf, Matthias, and Ferdinand, who now holds the governance of the Most August Empire, constantly adhered to the ancient Roman Church and profess themselves its advocates and defenders. They requested the Council and obtained it; they urged the restoration and continuation of it when interrupted;
they promoted it and, when it had been completed, commended it to their subjects.
It is indeed fitting that members be conformed to the head and subjects obey the Magistrate. But those men will say, “It is necessary to obey God rather than men.” Yet they use so holy a maxim seditiously and impiously. For those Emperors were neither Jews nor Gentiles, nor do they rise against God so as to command what God forbids. But if they held them to be such, why by their own votes did they impose tyrants and persecutors upon the Christian people? Why did they themselves prefer to stand beneath the blow of an idolatrous prince rather than elect an Orthodox man from their own brotherhood? Why do they themselves condemn the Emperor whose religion all antiquity approved?
But I have already demonstrated these things above. I press this point, that I may make plain that stable peace cannot exist where there is so great an ἀνεμονία [wind-driven instability] and ἀκοινωνία [lack of communion] between the head and members. This formerly shook Germany with war, when the agitators of the pseudo-Gospel stirred up the princes against the supreme Magistrate. That war, notable as it was, was lamentable and destructive to the fatherland through the disasters of cities, the devastation of fields, and the chains of princes.
Even now there remain men who from Switzerland and neighboring places call the Emperor the Apocalyptic beast and the Empire the fullness of devilism. Indeed, at the most recent fair an image was publicly sold in which Ambrogio Spinola, an incomparable hero and commander of the imperial and royal army, rides upon the seven-headed beast. These things are certainly opposed to peace. But they gush from one fountain: that they hate the religion of the Emperor, to whose clemency, prudence, and justice they have entrusted themselves.
§7
The battles of the Calvinists and Lutherans among themselves are now known. The Calvinists defend themselves because they have been condemned by no council. Sturm writes in the Antipappus, page 197, that “the Papistic doctrine ought not to be defamed and repudiated as erroneous, since no legitimate general council has defined this or rejected the Papists together with their doctrine.” Thus also the Calvinists in the preface to the Orthodox Consensus, thus Hospinian, thus Pareus in his Irenicum.
Accordingly, the preacher Hoe says that in this part they agree entirely with the Papists and Jesuits, who can do nothing other than cry, “Council, Council, Council!” That courtly chief preacher then proceeds: “In what, therefore, does the necessity of a council consist? Does it not follow from this that more is placed in the council than in Scripture? That the authority of the council is greater and more conspicuous than that of Scripture? Is this not entirely to fall back into the Papacy up to the girdle?”
If a council is needed for the condemnation of false dogmas, behold: I have already furnished so many councils which condemned these teachings; why, therefore, do the Calvinists not reject them? For concerning Scripture without another authority, fanatical spirits will never agree. Our religion has been condemned by no council, theirs by many; therefore let them abandon the condemned religion and, together with the Emperor their head, follow the uncondemned one—indeed, the one approved by councils.
§8
I should wish that the princes and states of Germany would learn what must next be done, not from turbulent enemies of truth, or impostors and apostates, but from the ancient Emperors, who led the way by deed and voice. It is fitting for the Germans, whom God has raised to the Empire in this last age of the world, to emulate them. Constantine undertook by imperial authority the execution of the Council of Nicaea. Theodosius the Younger defended the decrees of Ephesus; Valentinian and Marcian defended Chalcedon. Nor did any orthodox prince allow his labor to be lacking where it was required for those things which had been established by councils.
Golden indeed are the words in the decree of Emperor Marcian: “The profane contention has now departed. For truly impious and sacrilegious is he who, after the judgment of so many priests, leaves anything to be treated by his own opinion. It is indeed the height of madness to seek an imaginary light in the midst of clear day. For whoever investigates anything further after the truth has been discovered seeks a lie.” But the Council of Trent must be defended much more earnestly, because in it the ancient councils are found and the deeds of pious kings are commended for imitation.
§9
In this Council that was done which all judged necessary for all councils: namely, that it be convoked by the vicar of Christ, that those who possess the right pronounce judgment, and that security and liberty be conceded to all. Accordingly, the legates of kings, princes, and states were present, and kings embraced the Council. Why will a few princes in Germany not do what they know that the others did with great praise for constancy, sincerity, and religion? Why do they not prefer foreign princes as friends and allies rather than as suspected persons?
We daily see divisions of minds, secret counsels, and confederations arising from deep envy and hatred toward Catholic princes. Hence come the estrangement of nations and hereditary dissensions. Italians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen are alienated from Lutheran Germans, while the Germans themselves are inflamed against Catholic nations by perpetual invectives, calumnies, and defamatory pamphlets. And yet, since human affairs are fragile and fleeting, it can happen that they need mutual aid and that they must become suppliants to those whom they presume to be enemies.
Why, therefore, do the German princes not embrace the true and ancient religion of their fathers, explained by the Council of Trent, so that they may enter into, renew, and confirm affection and treaties with foreign nations? Why do they permit their subjects to be aroused by factious and tribunician preachers to hatred of other kingdoms—kingdoms which deserve better of the German princes than the preachers themselves do?
Look at the matter. The Innovators contend that all the ancestors of the princes were what they fashion us to be: Antichristians, that is, the most criminal of all men; and by so atrocious a charge they defame all the families of Germany. The Council defends the faith, honor, right of succession, and reputation of illustrious families. Why do you attend to malevolent detractors, to the reproach of yourselves and your stock, and neglect the true defenders of your dignity and your ancestors?
Behold: kings no less powerful than your Emperor nevertheless defer to the Emperor and with an untroubled mind hold the second or third places, reverencing the Sacred and August Empire of which you are noble members. But your preachers, as I taught at the beginning of On Syncretism, do not fear to call and write that it is Antichristian, the Apocalyptic beast, and the fullness of devilism. Therefore at last recognize these men who, under the pretense of truth, mock your noble and inborn nobility; once recognized, abandon them.
Have you not yet recognized them? Do they not direct and toss you and your subjects at their decision, not without tumults? Now they drive you, after the manner of cattle, into Luther’s pens, now into Calvin’s; then again they send you out upon the sea of Ubiquity and expose you to Flacian winds. Now they remove bishops, now restore them; now compel you to grow mild with the Hollanders, now to grow rigid with the Genevans. They are constant only in their own mutability. Return, therefore, to the truth of the ancient age,
for there is no end of innovating, since every novelty destitute of truth is swiftly removed by another novelty.
§10
Ninth. I marvel if all are not able to touch their error with their own hands. For what, I ask, is more ill-advised than to write a few private laws of princes and towns concerning a common thing—that is, concerning the religion of all Christian kingdoms—and to establish an ecclesiastical order, and from the municipal laws of one party to overturn universal law?
Augustine rightly says on Psalm 75: “Truth is common; it is not mine, nor yours, nor his, nor that man’s; it is common to all. And no one says, ‘It is mine,’ lest he wish to make his own portion of that which stands in the midst for all.”
What, I ask, did the few subscribers of the Confession say at Augsburg in the year 1530? “Truth is on our side; the rest of the world is insane; we alone are wise; the others ὡς σκιαὶ πέτονται [fly like shadows].” And not only those who now live, but all ages were ignorant of the truth. How do new and few men judge it worthy that all Christians should migrate into their laws, abandon approved things, and condemn salutary things? Why does the small number not rather yield to the universality, subjects to their Magistrates, sheep to shepherds?
§11
A rival confession is opposed to the Council, Augsburg to Trent, Philip Melanchthon to the Pontiff. I exhort and beseech you to believe the Council and acknowledge the Pontiff, for as a leader in withdrawing from the Confession you possess Philip Melanchthon himself, the author of the Confession—and now almost all of you have withdrawn. The author himself condemned and hated his own work. The rule which he offered to the world he himself broke; what as a younger man he approved, when older he rescinded. See Roland Pontanus, book 3 On Memorable Affairs. See Melanchthon’s letters to Frederick the Palatine; see his tears concerning ἀρτολατρίᾳ [bread-worship].
If the master and craftsman of a Confession of so great a name—so that he alone seemed to have imbibed Luther’s spirit and mind—abandoned the Confession, enticed neither by a reward, nor by human fear, nor by hope, and condemned his own decrees before he had even heard the Council’s decrees, the disciple is not above the master. Do not retain what its maker cast away.
“We shall therefore be Calvinists,” you will say, “for he passed over to Calvin.”
By no means. Follow him when he condemns evil things; flee him when he follows worse things. For to which Calvinists will you depart? He was one of the Mild, and therefore not even thus will you stand among the larger minority; you will dwell amid the offense of more men. Yet you will be nearer the Council than if you thus harden yourself in the αὐθαδείᾳ obstinacy of the Rigid. Both his letters and Joachim Mörlin’s book, which Andreas Petri of Eisleben printed in the year 1565, teach that Melanchthon defected to the Calvinists.
But concerning Philip let it be as you wish. “We oppose the Confession to the Council.” Yet that Confession is neither certain nor pleasing to all your people; it has been changed ten times. Nor do I alone or the Calvinists alone say this, but your own countrymen themselves. Andreas Musculus, in his Pious and Necessary Admonition concerning Avoiding the Gross and More-than-Papistic Errors of Major, book 3, folio 194, says: “The authors of the Confession accommodated themselves to the time, or wrote without sufficient consideration.”
What then? Will you prefer to the Council of Trent—a council to which the councils and Fathers of all times bear testimony—a confession which in my judgment is novel and heretical, in the censure of the Calvinists a torch by which France is set aflame, and in the confession of the Lutherans a confession accommodated to the time and written without consideration? What then does Musculus conclude from this? “Therefore an argument taken from the authority of the Confession and the Apology is not valid.” Deservedly indeed; for a temporary and inconsiderate confession must be corrected according to the words of eternal truth, the most carefully considered councils, and the confessions and martyrdoms of fifteen centuries.
What does Abdias, the defender of the Confession, reply to these things? “I should have omitted our Confession if this must truly be alleged concerning it. On that reasoning, what else is it than a confession written without consideration and accommodated to the time? In this manner it will cease to be authentic; in this manner a most splendid occasion is given to our adversaries for condemning us ourselves together with our Confession. In this manner we ourselves cannot be certain concerning our religion, nor shall we leave anything certain to posterity. In this manner the distinguished testimonies of Luther and others concerning the Augsburg Confession will most unworthily fall away.”
Since they now see that these things have occurred, there is no reason why they should adhere to a slippery and ambiguous confession and spurn the orthodox agreement of all ages explained and handed down by the Council of Trent.
§12
The Augsburg Confession cannot be salutary, since, like a tragic buskin, it fits either foot, and sits not upon two stools but upon twenty. For it has been changed, corrected, and mutilated in many editions, the beginning of the alteration having been made by its author himself, so that it is now asked of which edition each professor is.
Then, how many heresies lurk beneath that cloak? The Calvinists claim it for themselves, but rightly understood; the Ubiquitarians arrogate it to themselves alone, but explained in their own sense; all the others think so diversely and dissent so inimically. Pareus attempts to prove that it is defended by no one such as it was first proposed. If no one defends it in that form, why does he adhere to it once changed? Why does one who has cast away a part of falsehood not profess the truth in its integrity? Does he not show as vain and mendacious the vaunting of Melanchthon and his colleagues about Scripture alone, infallible truth, and new light, since he withdrew from the Confession at least in part? The Estates of the Augsburg Confession were deceived by the cunning of impious men in the very construction of the Confession, because the Confession was interpolated, changed, and abandoned by posterity.
Eternal salvation, therefore, is not in a temporary confession; stability of faith is not in daily ἐφημερινῷ vaunting. Rather, it is in that Rock upon which Christ built the Church, against which the Augsburg Confession, when it dashed, was broken and flew apart into little pieces. Those who are called the Estates of the Augsburg Confession vainly attempted to join and solder them together. Secular power cannot bind spiritual wickednesses, nor does God permit the concord of those in error to grow excessively, lest it give authority to error.
§13
Finally, the salvation which they lose so inexcusably ought to move everyone to return to the place from which they rashly departed. “He who hears you hears me; he who despises you despises me,” was said. The men of Trent can say this: bishops joined to the Apostolic Church through perpetual succession, handing down through the succession of the Apostolic Churches the faith.
Cyprian, Letter 9, book 4: “You ought to know that the Bishop is in the Church and the Church in the Bishop; and that if any are not with the Bishop, they are not in the Church. And those who, not having peace with the priests, creep in, flatter themselves in vain, since the Church, which is one and Catholic, has not been rent or divided, but is certainly connected and joined by the glue of priests cohering mutually with one another.”
You await salvation in vain while of your own accord you separate yourselves from fellowship with the common and ancient Church, whence saving doctrine is derived to us.
For what excuse is there for abandoning and condemning the doctrine of so many saints and adhering to the opinions of those who themselves condemned them? The Apostles were the Fathers of the Church; in place of the fathers those sons were born and were appointed Bishops. The Church herself calls them fathers. She herself begot them and established them in the seats of the fathers. Therefore do not think her deserted because you do not see Peter, because you do not see Paul, because you do not see those through whom she was born. Fatherhood comes from the offspring of the Church: in place of her fathers sons have been born to her, appointed as princes over all the earth—princes for explaining the faith, princes for implanting piety, princes for abolishing error.
§14
May he who inhabits inaccessible light illuminate the eyes of your mind and strengthen your spirits, so that you may dare to say to your Innovators what Augustine said to the disturbers of his own time in chapter 14 of On the Usefulness of Believing:
“I did not see Christ himself in the manner in which he willed to appear to men, who is proclaimed to have been seen even by these ordinary eyes. When I consider whom I believed concerning him, so that, now furnished beforehand with such faith, I might approach you, I see that I believed none except the confirmed opinion of peoples and nations and a most celebrated report; and that the mysteries of the Catholic Church have occupied these peoples everywhere. Why, therefore, should I not inquire most diligently among them above all what Christ commanded, since, moved by their authority, I have already believed that Christ commanded something useful? Will you explain to me better what he said—you at whose recommendation I would not think that he existed or exists, if this were commended to me as something to be believed? This, therefore, as I have said, I believed through report strengthened by rapid diffusion, agreement, and antiquity.
“But you are so few—and so few—and so turbulent, and so new, that no one doubts that you here bring forward nothing worthy of authority. What, therefore, is this so great madness? ‘Believe those men that Christ is to be believed, and learn from us what he said.’ Why, I ask you? For if they should fail and could teach me nothing, I should far more easily persuade myself that Christ is not to be believed than that anything concerning him must be learned from anyone except those through whom I had believed him.
“O enormous confidence—or rather folly! ‘I teach you what CHRIST commanded, in whom you believe.’ What if I did not believe in him? Would you be able to teach me anything concerning him? ‘But,’ he says, ‘it is necessary that you believe.’ Is it because you commend him to us?
“‘No,’ he says, ‘for by reason we lead those who believe him.’ Why, therefore, should I believe him? ‘Because the report has been established.’ Whether through you or through others? ‘Through others,’ he says. Shall I therefore believe them so that you may teach me? Perhaps I ought to, unless they chiefly warn me precisely of this: that I must not approach you at all. For they say that you possess pernicious doctrines. You will answer: ‘They lie.’ How, therefore, shall I believe them concerning Christ, whom they do not wish to see?
“He says, ‘Believe the writings.’ But if every writing is presented as new and undoubted, or is commended by a few, with no reason confirming it, belief is accorded not to it but to those who present it. Therefore, if you who are so few and unknown present those writings, I am not inclined to believe them. At the same time you also act contrary to your promise, by commanding faith rather than rendering a reason. Again you will recall me to the multitude and the report. Restrain at last your obstinacy and some indomitable lust for propagating your name. Rather, admonish me to seek the chief men of this multitude, and to seek most diligently, so that I may learn something concerning these writings from those men through whom, if they did not exist, I should be wholly unaware that it must be learned. But you, return to your hiding places, and do not plot anything under the name of the truth which you attempt to take away from those to whom you yourself concede authority.”