unlawful, immoral, while the religious movement was reforming, lawful, and moral; but the hard and fast line which is thus drawn vanishes on a closer investigation. The peasants had no constitutional means wherewith to attain their ends, and there is no reason to suppose that they would have resorted to force unless force had been prepared to resist them; if, as Luther maintained, it was the Christian's duty to tolerate worldly ills, it was incumbent on Christian Princes as well as on Christian peasants; and if, as he said, the Peasants' Revolt was a punishment divinely ordained for the Princes, what right had they to resist? Moreover, the Lutherans themselves were only content with constitutional means so long as they proved successful; when they failed Lutherans also resorted to arms against their lawful Emperor. Nor was there anything in the peasants' demands more essentially revolutionary than the repudiation of the Pope's authority and the wholesale appropriation of ecclesiastical property. The distinction between the two movements has for its basis the fact that the one was successful, the other was not; while the Peasants' Revolt failed, the Reformation triumphed, and then discarded its revolutionary guise and assumed the respectable garb of law and order.
Luther in fact saved the Reformation by cutting it adrift from the failing cause of the peasants and tying it to the chariot wheels of the triumphant Princes. If he had not been the apostle of revolution, he had at least commanded the army in which all the revolutionaries fought. He had now repudiated his left wing and was forced to depend on his right. The movement from 1521 to 1525 had been national, and Luther had been its hero; from the position of national hero he now sank to be the prophet of a sect, and a sect which depended for existence upon the support of political powers. Melanchthon admitted that the decrees of the Lutheran Church were merely platonic conclusions without the support of the Princes, and Luther suddenly abandoned his views on the freedom of conscience and the independence of the Church. In 1523 he had proclaimed the duty of obeying God before men; at the end of 1524 he was invoking the secular arm against the remnant of papists at Wittenberg; it was to punish the ungodly, he said, that the sword had been placed in the hands of authority, and it was in vain that the Elector Frederick reminded him of his previous teaching, that men should let only the Word fight for them. Separated from the Western Church and alienated from the bulk of the German people, Lutheran divines leant upon territorial Princes, and repaid their support with undue servility; even Henry VIII extorted from his bishops no more degrading compliance than the condoning by Melanchthon and others of Philip of Hesse's bigamy. Melanchthon came to regard the commands of princes as the ordinances of God, while Luther looked upon them as Bishops of the Church, and has been classed by Treitschke with Machiavelli as a champion of the indefeasible rights of the State. Erastiis,
