Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

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and that many of them had fought side by side on foreign battlefields. f263
“We shall not fight,” they said;, and pray God that the storm may pass
away without doing us any harm.” Jacob Sturm, the burgomaster of
Strassburg, who was present as a mediator, was struck with the
manifestation of personal harmony and friendship in the midst of organized
hostility. “You are a singular people,” he said; “though disunited, you are
united.”
§ 43. THE FIRST PEACE OF CAPPEL. JUNE, 1529.
After several negotiations, a treaty of Peace was concluded June 25, 1529,
between Zürich, Bern, Basel, St. Gall, and the cities of Mühlhausen and
Biel on the one hand, and the five Catholic Cantons on the other. The
deputies of Glarus, Solothurn, Schaffhausen, Appenzell, Graubünden,
Sargans, Strassburg, and Constanz acted as mediators.
The treaty was not all that Zwingli desired, especially as regards the
abolition of the pensions and the punishment of the dispensers of pensions
(wherein he was not supported by Bern), but upon the whole it was
favorable to the cause of the Reformation.
The first and most important of the Eighteen Articles of the treaty
recognizes, for the first time in Europe, the principle of parity or legal
equality of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches,—a principle
which twenty-six years afterwards was recognized also in Germany (by the
Augsburger Religionsfriede of 1555), but which was not finally settled
there till after the bloody baptism of the Thirty Years’ War, in the Treaty of
Westphalia (1648), against which the Pope of Rome still protests in vain.
That article guarantees to the Reformed and Roman Catholic Cantons
religious freedom in the form of mutual toleration, and to the common
bailiwicks the right to decide by majority the question whether they would
remain Catholics or become Protestants. f264 The treaty also provided for
the payment of the expenses of the war by the five cantons, and for an
indemnity to the family of the martyred Kaiser. The abolition of the foreign
pensions was not demanded, but recommended to the Roman Catholic
Cantons. The alliance with Austria was broken. The document which
contained the treasonable treaty was cut to pieces by Aebli in the presence
of Zwingli and the army of Zürich. f265