the position to which they had themselves been reduced by the Recess of Speier in 1529; every legal obstacle to the Lutheran development was to be removed, while Catholics were deprived of their means of defence.
The Catholics were not yet brought so low as to submit to such terms; for months the struggle of parties went on, and it seemed possible that another religious war might ensue. Eventually a compromise was arranged mainly by Ferdinand and Augustus of Saxony. Security was granted to all Lutheran Princes; episcopal jurisdiction in their lands was to cease; and they might retain all ecclesiastical property secularised before the Treaty of Passau (1552), provided it was not immediately subject to the Empire. For the future each territorial secular Prince might choose between the Catholic and Lutheran faith, and his decision was to bind all his subjects. If a subject rejected his sovereign's religion the only privilege he could claim was liberty to migrate into other lands. There remained two all-important points in dispute. The Lutherans still required toleration for the adherents of their confession in Catholic States; and the Catholics demanded that any ecclesiastical Prince, who abjured Catholicism, should forfeit his lands and dignities. The Catholic objections to the first demand were insuperable; and the Lutherans were compelled to content themselves with an assurance by Ferdinand, which was not incorporated in the Recess, did not become law of the Empire, and of which the Reichsleammergerwht could therefore take no cognisance. The Catholic requirement about spiritual Princes was met by the famous "ecclesiastical reservation" which imposed forfeiture of lands and dignities on Bishops who forsook the Catholic faith. This was incorporated in the Recess; but the Lutherans made their own reservation, and declared that they did not consider themselves bound by the proviso.
The so-called Peace of Augsburg, embodied in the Recess which was published on September £5, 1555, thus rested upon a double equivocation, and contained in itself the seeds of the Thirty Years' War. It was in fact no more than a truce concluded, not because the two parties had decided the issues upon which they fought, but because they were for the moment tired of fighting; and no half-measure was ever pursued by a more relentless Nemesis. The " ecclesiastical reservation " has been condemned as the worst sin of omission of which Protestant Germany was guilty, as a criminal and cowardly evasion of a vital decision, which delay could only make more difficult. The artificial perpetuation of spiritual principalities only served to buttress the Habsburg power and postpone the achievement of national unity. In the other scale a Catholic would place the fact that to the rescue of the ecclesiastical Electorates from the rising tide of Protestantism must be attributed in no small measure the hold which Catholicism still retains on western Germany.
This lame and halting conclusion of nearly forty years' strife has been hailed as the birth of religious liberty; but it is mockery to describe the principle which underlay the Peace of Augsburg as one of toleration.
