Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/50

 siastical Reservation. Let the following considerations be added:

The terms of the peace had no clasticity. They provided for no progress. They required the parties to remain just where they were placed, perhaps that the one might have the better chance to convert the other. They contemplated, for instance, on the Protestant side, nothing but the Lutheran Church. In the meantime part of the Empire had accepted the Reformed faith of Calvin. Their right to do so might not in time of peace be questioned, but in a civil war of the Empire it was not to be expected that a Catholic Emperor would go beyond the letter of the law and concede to another sect rights granted only to Lutherans. And then the Lutherans felt scarcely less of enmity toward Calvinists than toward Catholics. There was no union of hcart between the Protestant powers.

The practical difficulty was augmented by the division of Germany into so many principalities, having their rivalships and their diverse interests. In our modern tendency to centralization, this fact in the history of the German Empire is quite ridiculous; let us, however, before indulging our ridicule too far, remember that this very fact has tended to make Germany the world’s school. Every little prince was ambitious to have his educational system culminating in a university, and to excel in these provisions. Thus has Germany, since the great struggle in the opening of the seventeenth century, become the world’s school and its library, though this state of things seemed to work against the cause of freedom in that contest.

There was, however, a Union of the Protestant States formed in 1608, in prospective protection against en-