were comparatively simple; he adhered to medieval Catholicism because he could comprehend no other creed and conceive of no other form of ecclesiastical polity. As well let there be two Emperors as two independent standards of faith. The Church like the Empire must be one and indivisible, and he must be the sovereign of the one and the protector of the other.
With these ideas it was impossible for Charles even to contemplate a permanent toleration of schism or heresy. His concessions to the Lutherans from 1526 to 1544 were not made with any such intention; they were simply payments extorted from Charles by necessity for indispensable services to be rendered against the Turks and the French; they were all provisional and were limited in time to the meeting of a General Council. That they sprang from necessity and not from any reluctance of Charles to persecute is proved by his conduct in other lands than Germany. He did not attempt a policy of toleration or comprehension in Spain or in the Netherlands; there his methods were the Inquisition and the stake. Wherever he had the power to persecute he persecuted; he abstained in Germany only because he had no other choice and because he thought his abstention was not for ever; and in the end the most powerful motive for his abdication was his desire to escape the necessity of countenancing permanent schism.
Throughout, Charles was steadfast to the idea of Catholic unity; but his determination to enforce it at the cost of war was the growth of time and the result of the gradual course of events. He is credited with a desire to effect his end by the method of comprehension; but room for the Lutherans in the Catholic Church was to be found not so much by widening the portals of the Church as by narrowing Lutheran doctrine, by the partial submission of the Lutherans and not by the surrender of current Catholicism. It soon became obvious that the Lutherans would never be brought to the point of voluntary submission; and so early as 1531 the Emperor would have resorted to persecution if he had had the means. But from persecution to war was a long step, and he would have shrunk from war at that date even if it had been in his power to wage it. Before 1545, however, this reluctance had been removed. The logic of facts had proved that it was a death-struggle in Germany between the medieval Church and Empire on the one hand and Protestant territorialism on the other. The fault was partly the Emperor's; by making himself the champion of the old religion he had forced an alliance between the anti-Catholic Reformers and the anti-imperial Princes; and from 1532 onwards territorial and Protestant principles had made vast strides at the expense of Catholicism and the Empire. It is not necessary, nor is it possible, to determine which advance alarmed Charles most; both were equally fatal to the position which he had adopted. The threatened secularisation of the ecclesiastical electorates would have converted Germany from a Catholic monarchy
