Rise and Establishment of Protestantism at Geneva - James Aitken Wylie

een sure of their heads. Meanwhile, prosecutions
against the Protestants in the imperial chamber
were to be dropped, and no one on either side was
to be disturbed on account of his religion. The
Protestants thought they saw the cloven foot in the
attempts to confine this agreement to those of the
Augsburg Confession. The emperor had the best
reasons for excluding the Swiss from its benefits.
He knew that should the German and Swiss
Reformers combine, and form one Protestant camp,
extending from the Baltic to the banks of the
Rhone, and the foot of the Pennine mountains, the
cause of Rome would be lost north of the Alps, and
his own dynastic projects along with it.[8]
We turn with a peculiar pleasure from the
chamber of conference, to the yet more sacred
chamber where the Reformation's greatest scholar,
and its greatest theologian, were about to commune
together. From the first moment Melancthon and
Calvin understood each other. Of Melancthon's
inviolable loyalty at heart to the Protestant creed
Calvin had not a doubt. The unwise concessions
into which his love of peace at times betrayed him,
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