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 Melanchthon's attitude was similar to that of 1530, and aroused much discontent among the bolder Lutherans; his criticisms of Luther and John Frederick seemed oblivious of his former relations with them and of the facts that one was dead and the other in prison. At a conference with the Catholics at Pegau he gave away much of the Lutheran case; but the Interim met with greater resistance at a second debate at Torgau in October, 1548, and was likened to the forbidden fruit with which Eve tempted Adam. At Celle, however, in the following month its advocates once more prevailed, and the formulary which they drew up was adopted at a Saxon Diet at Leipzig; thence it took the name of the Leipzig Interim and became the rule for Saxon lands.

Over almost the whole of Germany the Interim was now enforced, and Charles was so elated by his success that he thought of pressing its acceptance upon the Scandinavian kingdoms, upon England, and even upon Russia. Yet his triumph was illusory and short-lived; even Melanchthon, who conformed, secretly counselled resistance, and people followed his private precept rather than his public example. Three years later two English ambassadors at Charles' court gave a description of the situation in Augsburg. An imperial commission had charged the ministers of that city with preaching against the Interim and refusing to say Mass in their churches. The divines replied that they durst say none, being more loth to offend God than willing to please man; the Apostles had neither said nor heard Mass; and for themselves if they were in fault the fault was no new one, for they had said no masses for fourteen years. They were then compelled to leave the city, which remained disconsolate; there were few shops in which people might not be seen in tears; a hundred women besieged the Emperor's gates "howling and asking in their outcries where they should christen their children," and where they should marry. "For all this the Papist churches have no more customers than they had; not ten of the townsmen in some of their greatest synagogues. The churches where the Protestants did by thousands at once communicate are locked up, and the people, being robbed of all their godly exercises, sit weeping and wailing at home." Strassburg and Nürnberg were in no better mood; when Charles required the young Duke Christopher of Württemberg to expel John Brenz, he replied that he was as willing as the Emperor to do so, but it was not in his power unless he could expel all his subjects with him.

Against a spirit like this the Emperor laboured in vain. It availed him little that Paul III in his dying days recognised the Interim and dissolved the Council at Bologna; that Julius III repaired his predecessor's error and sent his prelates to Trent where Charles' Bishops still kept up the continuity of the Council; or that in January, 1552, some Protestant delegates appeared there and reinforced the opposition to the Pope. The reunion did not assuage the struggle between papal and