Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/198

 denied. While Luther adopted the teaching of St Augustine, Erasmus was regarded at Wittenberg as little better than a Pelagian, and his personal conflict with Hütten was soon followed by a more important encounter with Luther. Urged by Catholics to attack the new theology, Erasmus with intuitive skill selected the doctrine of free will, which he asserted in a treatise of great moderation. Luther's reply was remarkable for the unflinching way in which he accepted the logical consequences of his favourite dogma. But that did not make it more palatable, and Erasmus' book confirmed not a few in their antipathy to the Lutheran cause.

These were by no means blind partisans of the Papacy. Murner, the scholar and poet; Jerome Emser, the secretary to Duke George of Saxony; Cochlaeus, Heynlin von Stein, Alexander Hegius, Luther's old master- Staupitz, Karl von Miltitz, Johann Faber, Pirkheimer, and many another had long desired a reformation of the Church, but they looked to a General Council and legal methods. Revolution and disruption they considered too great a price to pay for reform, and therefore sadly threw in their lot with the forces which were preparing to do battle for the Catholic Church, purified or corrupt. Slowly also a section of the German laity began to range itself on the same side, and from the confused mêlée of public opinion two organised parties gradually emerged. Here and there this or that form of religious belief obtained a decisive predominance and began to control the organisation of a city or principality in the interests of one or the other party. An infinity of local circumstances contributed to each local decision; dynastic conditions might assist a Prince to determine with which religious party to side, and relations with a neighbouring Bishop or even trading interests might exert a similar influence over the corporate conscience of cities. But with regard to Germany as a whole, and with a few significant exceptions, the frontiers of the Latin Church ultimately coincided to a remarkable extent with those of the old Roman Empire. Where the legions of the Caesars had planted their standards and founded their colonies, where the Latin speech and Latin civilisation had permeated the people, there in the sixteenth century the Roman Church retained its hold. The limits of the Roman Empire are in the main the boundaries between Teutonic and Latin Christianity. But Latin Christianity saved itself in southern Germany only by borrowing some of the weapons of the original opponents of Rome, and the Counter-Reformation owed its success to its adoption of many of the practical proposals and some of the doctrinal ideas of the Reformation. The confiscation of Church property and the limitation of clerical prerogative went on apace in Catholic as well as in Protestant countries, and, while the spiritual prerogatives of the Papacy were magnified at the Council of Trent, its practical power declined. It secured secular aid by making concessions to the secular power. The earliest example