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

every State should be at liberty to act in it as it
judged right. Thus the Diet, the assembling of
which the friends of the Reformation had seen with
alarm, and its enemies with triumph, seeing it was
to ring the death-knell of Protestantism, achieved
just the opposite result. It inflicted a blow which
broke in pieces the theocratic sovereignty of Rome
in the German States of the Empire, and cleared the
ground for the building of a new spiritual temple.
Luther was quick to perceive the opportunity
that had at length arrived. The edict of 1526
sounded to him as a call to arise and build. When
the Reformer came down from the Wartburg,
where doubtless he had often meditated on these
things, there was a Reformation, but no Reformed
Church; there were Christians, but no visible
Christian society. His next work must be to restore
such. The fair fabric which apostolic hands had
reared, and which primitive times had witnessed,
had been cast down long since, and for ages had
lain in ruins: it must be built up from its old
foundations. The walls had fallen, but the
foundations, he knew, were eternal, like those of
210