prove more propitious. Low as the central authority had fallen before the onslaughts of territorial separatists, it was not yet prepared to admit that the question of the nation's religion had for ever escaped its control. But for the moment it was compelled to look on while individual Princes organised Churches at will; and the majority had to content themselves with replying to Lutheran expulsion of Catholic doctrine by enforcing it still more rigorously in their several spheres of influence.
The right to make ecclesiastical ordinances, which the Empire had exercised at Worms in 1521 and at Nürnberg in 1523 and 1524, but had temporarily abandoned at Speier, was not restored to the Church, but passed to the territorial Princes, in whose hostility to clerical privileges and property Luther found his most effective support. Hence the democratic form of Church government, which had been elaborated by François Lambert and adopted by a synod summoned to Homberg by Philip of Hesse in October, 1526, failed to take root in Germany It was based on the theory that every Christian participates in the priesthood, that the Church consists only of the faithful, and that each religious community should have complete independence and full powers of ecclesiastical discipline. It was on similar lines that " Free " Churches were subsequently developed in Scotland, England, France, and America. But such ideas were alien to the absolute monarchic principle with which Luther had cast in his lot, and the German Reformers, like the Anglican, preferred a Church in which the sovereign and not the congregation was the summits episcopus. In his hands were vested the powers of punishment for religious opinion, and in Germany as in England religious persecutions were organised by the State. It was perhaps as well that the State and not the Lutheran Church exercised coercive functions, for the rigour applied by Lutheran Princes to dissident Catholics fell short of Luther's terrible imprecations, and of the cruelties inflicted on heretics in orthodox territories.
The breach between the Lutheran Church and the Church of Rome was, with regard to both ritual and doctrine, slight compared with that effected by Zwingli or Calvin. Latin Christianity was the groundwork of the Lutheran Church, and its divines sought only to repair the old foundation and not to lay down a new. Luther would tolerate no figurative interpretation of the words of institution of the Eucharist, and he stoutly maintained the doctrine of a real presence, in his own sense. With the exception of the "abominable canon," which implied a sacrifice, the Catholic Mass was retained in the Lutheran Service; and on this question every attempt at union with the "Reformed" Churches broke down. The changes introduced during the ecclesiastical visitations of Lutheran Germany in 1526-7 were at least as much concessions to secular dislike of clerical privilege as to religious antipathy to Catholic doctrine. The abolition of episcopal jurisdiction increased the independence of parish priests, but it enhanced even more the princely
