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- 11 - power. The territorial principle was embodied in the famous clause of the treaty of Westphalia: “Cujus regio illius religio." That principle explains the lamentable but undoubted fact that the Luther Church speedily degenerated into an Establishment mainly of Junkers and Court Chaplains.

It may be objected that even granting this degeneration of the German Church, the fact still remains that Lutheranism did ultimately result in producing religious toleration. Yes, it did. As in this extraordinary geographical confusion of five hundred Protestant and Catholic principalities, it often happened that Catholic territories by conquest or by dynastic marriages were added to the Protestant territories. After many generations of religious struggle, it became necessary to come to some "modus vivendi." The rival Churches by some sort of arrangement had to live together, they had to agree to differ. As the outcome of practical necessity and of political compromise, as the outcome of exhaustion and indifference, toleration was the inevitable result. In fact the political attitude of degenerate Lutheranism became very much the attitude of Gibbon; "All