concerns me. Your
Electoral Highness may or may not believe this.

"Herewith I commend your Electoral Highness to God's grace; of anything
further we will speak when it is needful. For I have written this in
haste, that your Electoral Highness may not be troubled by the report
of my arrival, for I must comfort and not injure any one if I would be
a true Christian. I have to deal with quite a different man to Duke
George: we know each other well. If your Electoral Highness would have
faith, you would see the glory of God; but because you have not yet
faith, you have not seen it. Love and praise be to God in eternity.
Amen. Given at Borna by the messenger, Ash Wednesday, anno 1522.

"Your Electoral Highness's most obedient servant,

"Martin Luther."

CHAPTER VII.

GERMAN PRINCES AT THE IMPERIAL DIET.
(1547.)

Luther was dead. Over his grave raged the Smalkaldic war. Charles V.
made a triumphal progress through humiliated Germany.

Only once did these two men confront each other--these great opponents
whose spirits are still struggling in the German nation,--the
Burgundian Hapsburger and the German peasant's son--the Emperor
and the professor;--the one, who spoke German only to his horse; the
other, who translated the Bible and formed the new German language of
literature;--the one, the predecessor of the Jesuit protectors and the
originator of the Hapsburger family politics; the other, the forerunner
of Lessing the great German poet, historian, and philosopher.

It was a moment in German history pregnant with fate, when the young
Emperor, lord of half the world, spoke at Worms the disdainful
words,--"That man shall not make me a heretic." For then began the
struggle between his house and the spirit of the German nation. A
struggle of three centuries; victory and defeat on both sides; its
final issue not to be doubted.

When the German princes and lords of the Empire, with the envoys from
the free cities, rode to the Diet, they assembled to transact business
with the two rulers of Germany. These two rulers were the Pope and the
Emperor.

The Pope ruled in the holy Roman Empire of the German nation, not only
as chief bishop in his spiritual capacity, but equally as a political
power. A third of Germany was under the rule of ecclesiastical princes,
who had at least to be confi