From the Diet of Worms to the Augsburg Confession - James Aitken Wylie

towns were making rapid strides in the acquisition
of liberty, and their example taught the peasants the
way to achieve a like independence–by
combination. Letters and arts were awakening
thought and prompting to effort. Last of all came
the Reformation, and that great power vastly
widened the range of human vision, by teaching the
essential equality of all men, and weakening the
central authority, or key-stone in the arch of
Europe–namely, the Papacy.
It was now evident to many that the hour had
fully come when these wrongs, which dated from
ancient times, but which had been greatly
aggravated by recent events, must be redressed.
The patience of the sufferers was exhausted; they
had begun to feel their power; and if their fetters
were not loosed by their masters, they would be
broken by themselves, and with a blind rage and a
destructive fury proportioned to the ignorance in
which they had been kept, and the degradation into
which they had been sunk. In the words of an
eloquent writer and philosopher who flourished in
an after-age, "they would break their chains on the
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