The Cambridge modern history. Vol. IV, The Thiry Years' War / planned by the late Lord Acton ; edited by A.W. Ward, G.W. Prothero, Stanley Leathes.

Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Cambridge modern history. Vol. IV, The Thiry Years' War / planned by the late Lord Acton ; edited by A.W. Ward, G.W. Prothero, Stanley Leathes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1600-18] Division between Lutherans and Calvinists. and Saxony. The conversion to Rome in 1614 of Wolfgang William of Neuburg gave rise to a prolonged outburst of barren invective; and in 1615, having succeeded to the government of the duchy, he caused a religious disputation to be held in the presence of himself as a kind of corpus delicti. As is usual in seasons of embittered theological stiife, the transition was easy to coarse historic recrimination and malodorous personal scurrility—intellectual degradations which helped to prepare the national mind for the brutalising effects of war. The religious as well as the political differences that were distracting the Empire had by no means only brought Catholics and Protestants into mutual opposition. The Catholics themselves were not united either in action or in aim; and the trimming policy which Klesl was com- mending to his master, and which found a willing agent in the Protestant Controller-General (Reichspfennigmeister) Zacharias Geitzkofler, was strongly resented by the Jesuits, whose influence was paramount with both Maximilian of Bavaria and Ferdinand of Styria. But more fundamental was the fissure continuously widening between the two divisions of the Protestant body, the Lutherans and the Calvinists. The enduring antagonism between them was not wholly or even mainly due to political motives or dynastic interests—to the rivalry for the Protestant hegemony between Saxony and the Palatinate, the com- petition of interests involved in the Julich-Cleves difficulty, the conflicting views and sentiments as to the Imperial authority and the preservation of the integrity of the Empire and of its foreign policy. As has been already noted, Lutheran and Calvinist religious opinion had alike become more rigid, and consequently more combative; with the Lutherans it had been stiffened by the endeavour to enforce binding instruments of uniformity, while among the Calvinists the violent internal struggle had already set in which was to end in a drastic “ expurgation ” of most of the “ Reformed11 Churches of Europe. But as between the two religious communities, the opposition was radical; Luther had never made a secret of it, or of the fact that its roots lay in the doctrine of the Eucharist; and since his death it had steadily progressed to its logical results. Over the heads of the few who perceived the consequences to which open discord in the face of the common foe must inevitably lead, the polemical current poured its eddying waves, the Saxon theologians contending against the north- German Calvinists now settling at Berlin, and Heidelberg (quite literally) taking up the cudgels against Tubingen. Among the Lutheran leaders must be mentioned Hoe von Hohenegg, who as chief Court-preacher to the Elector John George held a position which, in accordance with the ideas of the age as to the relations between Church and State, made him the arbiter of the ecclesiastical, and frequently of the political, affairs of the Saxon electorate; and, among the Calvinist leaders, Abraham Scultetus, a Heidelberg divine who had