Protestant unanimity. In particular, as Elizabeth was often hearing from Germany, the dispute about the Lord's Supper was not to be composed, and a quarrel among divines was rapidly becoming a cause of quarrel among Princes. Well intentioned attempts to construct elastic phrases had done more harm than good, and it was questionable whether the Religious Peace would comprehend the Calvinising Palsgrave. As causes of political union and discord, all other questions of theology were at this moment of comparatively small importance; the line which would divide the major part of the Protestant world into two camps, to be known as Lutheran and Calvinist, was being drawn by theories of the Holy Supper. It is usual and for the great purposes of history it is right to class the Knoxian Church of Scotland as Calvinian, though about Predestination its Confession of Faith is as reticent as are the English Articles. Had it been possible for the English Church to leave untouched the hotly controverted question, the Queen would have been best pleased. She knew that at Hamburg, Westphal, a champion of militant Lutheranism, "never ceased in open pulpit to rail upon England and spared not the chiefest magistrates"; it was he who had denounced the Marian exiles as "the devil's martyrs." Since the first moment of her reign Christopher of Württemberg and Peter Paul Vergerio had been endeavouring to secure her for the Lutheran faith. Jewel, who was to be the Anglican apologist, heard with alarm of the advances made by the ex-Bishop of Capo d' Istria; and the godly Duke had been pained at learning that no less than twenty-seven of the Edwardian Articles swerved from the Augustan standard. Very lately he had urged the Queen to stand fast for a Real Presence. Now, Lutheranism was by this time politically respectable. When there was talk of a Bull against Elizabeth, the Emperor asked how a distinction was to be made between her and the Lutheran Princes, and could take for granted that no Pope with his wits about him would fulminate a sentence against those pillars of the Empire, Augustus of Saxony and Joachim of Brandenburg. When a few years later (1570) a Pope did depose Elizabeth, he was careful to accuse her of participation in "the impious mysteries of Calvin, " by which, no doubt, he meant the Cène. But though the Augustan might be the safer creed, she would not wish to separate herself from the Huguenots or the Scots, and could have little hope of obtaining from her Bishops a declaration that would satisfy the critical mind of the good Christopher. Concessions were made to him at points where little was at stake; words were taken from his own Württemberg Confession. When the perilous spot was reached, the English divines framed an Article which, as long experience has shown, can be signed by men who hold different opinions; but a charge of deliberate ambiguity could not fairly be brought against the Anglican fathers. In the light of the then current controversy we may indeed see some desire to give no needless offence to Lutherans, and apparently the Queen
