The Thirty Years' War - James Aitken Wylie

its awful strife.
The first grand settlement between the
Romanists and the Protestants was the Pacification
of Augsburg, in 1555. This Pacification gathered
up in one great edict all the advantages which
Protestantism had acquired during its previous
existence of nearly forty years, and it expressed
them all in one single word – Toleration. The same
word which summed up the gains of Protestantism
also summed up the losses of the empire; for the
empire had beam by pronouncing its ban upon
Luther and his followers, and now at the end of
forty years, and after all the great wars of Charles
V undertaken against the Protestants, the empire
was compelled to say, "I tolerate you."
So far had Protestantism molded the law of
Christendom, reared a barrier around itself, and set
limits to the intolerant and despotic forces that
assailed it from without. But this Toleration was
neither Perfect in itself, nor was it faithfully
observed. It was limited to Protestantism in its
Lutheran form, for Calvinists were excluded from
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