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 might be removed, but the medieval Church would remain in essence the same, and an attempt would be made to force them within its pale. Hence they repudiated the Council from the beginning; they denied that it was free, Christian, or General, the three conditions upon which alone they would recognise its authority; and at the Diet of Worms, which met in the spring of 1545, they demanded from Charles a permanent religious security quite independent of what the Council might decree. Nothing would ever have induced the Emperor to grant such terms; they would have involved him in the sin of schism and cut away the ground on which his whole position and policy were based; the one weapon with which he now hoped to effect his aims would have broken in his hands. So Ferdinand, who represented Charles, unhesitatingly rejected the petition; there was nothing, he truly said, in the decisions of Speier in the previous year to justify it.

War thus became inevitable, but Charles still sought to postpone it. He was not yet sure of peace with the Turks, of the Pope, or of the allies he hoped to win from the Lutheran side. Although the Spaniards at his Court spoke openly of the approaching extirpation of Protestantism, and although his confessor, Domenico de Soto, reinforced by the influence of Peter Canisius and other early missionaries of the Company of Jesus in Germany, was constantly urging him to take the decisive step, Granvelle and even Alva were still for peace, and the Emperor halted between the two opinions. To bring the Pope to terms he again made show of listening to the Lutherans. He expressed his intention of carrying out the decisions of the Diet of Speier, and annoyed the Catholics by again holding out the prospect of a national Council on religion, in case the General Council at Trent proved abortive. To this national assembly was also postponed the consideration of the various projects of reform which had been drawn up as a result of the Diet of Speier. The most notable of them was the "Wittenberg Reformation," which was drawn up by the Elector John Frederick, and signed by Luther, Bugenhagen, Cruciger, and Melanchthon, although it contains few traces of Luther's spirit. It recommended the establishment of a Protestant. episcopacy on the ground that Princes were too much immersed in secular affairs to exert a proper supervision over those of the Church; possibly also it was intended to reconcile the great Catholic Bishops to a change of faith.

During 1545, however, the last reasons for hesitation vanished. The Turks, threatened with war in Persia and with a dynastic dispute between Roxolana and Mustapha, listened to the mediation of Francis I, and concluded a truce with Charles and Ferdinand in October. The Emperor had nothing to fear from the Kings of France and England, who were then engaged in a bitter war; and Christian III of Denmark had been alienated by the Schmalkaldic Leaguers refusal to assist him in 1544, and alarmed by the admission into it of the Elector Palatine,