secular fiefs of
the empire. It was only after this hope had been abandoned that they
definitely took sides with the Papal authority.

The opening of the sixteenth century thus presents to us mediaeval
society, social, political, and religious, in Germany as elsewhere,
"run to seed." The feudal organization was outwardly intact; the
peasant, free and bond, formed the foundation; above him came the
knighthood or inferior nobility; parallel with them was the
_Ehrbarkeit_ of the less important towns, holding from mediate
lordship; above these towns came the free cities, which held
immediately from the empire, organized into three bodies, a governing
Council in which the _Ehrbarkeit_ usually predominated, where they did
not entirely compose it, a Common Council composed of the masters of
the various guilds, and the General Council of the free citizens.
Those journeymen, whose condition was fixed from their being outside
the guild-organizations, usually had guilds of their own. Above the
free cities in the social pyramid stood the Princes of the empire, lay
and ecclesiastic, with the Electoral College, or the seven Electoral
Princes, forming their head. These constituted the feudal "estates" of
the empire. Then came the "King of the Romans"; and, as the apex of
the whole, the Pope in one function and the Emperor in another,
crowned the edifice. The supremacy, not merely of the Pope but of the
complementary temporal head of the mediaeval polity, the Emperor, was
acknowledged in a shadowy way, even in countries such as France and
England, which had no direct practical connection with the empire.
For, as the spiritual power was also temporal, so the temporal
political power had, like everything else in the Middle Ages, a
quasi-religious significance.

The minds of men in speculative matters, in theology, in philosophy,
and in jurisprudence, were outgrowing the old doctrines, at least in
their old forms. In theology the notion of salvation by the faith of
the individual, and not through the fact of belonging to a corporate
organization, which was the mediaeval conception, was latent in the
minds of multitudes of religious persons before expression was given
to it by Luther. The aversion to scholasticism, bred by the revived
knowledge of the older Greek philosophies in the original, produced a
curious amalgam; but scholastic habits of thought were still dominant
through it all. The new theories of nature amounted to little more