In Switzerland from 1516 to 1525 - James Aitken Wylie

Badin. To it the Bishop of Constance carried his
complaint, importuning the court to suppress by the
secular arm the propagation of the new doctrines
by Zwingli and his fellow-laborers. The Diet was
not likely to turn a deaf ear to the bishop's
solicitations. The majority of its members were
pensioners of France and Italy, the friends of the
"foreign service" of which Zwingli was the
declared and uncompromising foe. They regarded
the preacher of Zurich with no favorable eye. Only
the summer before (1522), the Diet, at its meeting
in Lucerne, had put upon its records an order "that
priests whose sermons produced dissension and
disorder among the people should desist from such
preaching." This was the first persecuting edict
which disgraced the statute-book of Helvetia.
It had remained a dead letter hitherto, but now
the Diet resolved to put it in force, and made a
beginning by apprehending and imprisoning Urban
Weiss, a Protestant pastor in the neighborhood of
Baden. The monks, who saw that the Diet had
taken its side in the quarrel between Rome and the
Gospel, laid aside their timidity, and assuming the
153