Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/252

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the Protestants formally repudiated the Kammergericht as a partisan body, thus rejecting the last existing national institution, for the Reichsregiment was already dissolved. This however afforded them no protection, and in the Peace of Cadan they insisted that Ferdinand should quash all such proceedings of the Chamber as were directed against the members of the Schmalkaldic League. With this demand the King was forced to comply; the only compensation he received was the withdrawal of the Elector of Saxony's opposition to his recognition as King of the Romans. It was no wonder that men declared that Philip of Hesse had done more for the Reformation by his Württemberg enterprise than Luther could do in a thousand books.

Other causes than the weakness of Ferdinand and the disinclination of Lutherans to promote the ends of Francis I moved Catholic and Protestant Princes to the Peace of Cadan. Both alike were threatened by their common foe, the spirit of revolution, which in two different forms had now submerged Catholic Münster and Protestant Lübeck. Of the two phenomena the Anabaptist reign at Münster was the more to be feared and the harder to be explained, for the term by which it is known represents a mere accident of the movement as being its essence. It was not essentially theological, nor is "anabaptist1' an adequate or accurate expression of its theological peculiarities. The doctrines of second baptism and adult baptism are inoffensive enough, but attempts to realise the millennium, if successful, would be fatal to most forms of government, and a familiar parallel to the Münster revolutionists may be found in the English Fifth-monarchy men of the seventeenth century. In both cases millenary doctrines were only the outward form in which the revolutionary spirit was made manifest, and the spirit of revolution is always at bottom the same because it has its roots in the depths of human nature. The motive force which roused the English peasants in 1381 was essentially the same as that which dominated Münster in 1534 and lined the barricades of Paris in 1848. The revolutionist becomes a believer in the brotherhood of man, in the perfectibility of the race, and in the practicability of the millennium. The narrower his experience of men and affairs, the wider his flights of fancy; and revolutionary principles commonly find their most fruitful soil among hand-workers of sedentary occupation and straitened circumstances. In those submerged classes materials for discontent ever abound, awaiting the coincidence of two events to set them free, the flash of vision into better things and the disturbance of the repressive force of law and order. The Reformation produced them both; and the new gospel of Divine justice for the oppressed set the volcanic flood in motion, and strife between Catholic and Protestant authorities gave it a vent.

It was not to be expected that the rigid, respectable condition into which Lutheranism had sunk under the aegis of territorial Princes or even the more elastic religion of Zwingli would satisfy all of those