least inclined perhaps to enter into religious
polemics and ecclesiastical movements. Political and warlike interests
prevailed with it; with the people, those of a material nature. Become
wealthy by agriculture, rejoicing in ease and prosperity, they felt
little need of subjecting their faith to trial, and had just as little
occasion to defend it at any great sacrifice. In spiritual matters they
stuck to their leaders, whose contrary views, especially since the
Conference at Baden, began to show a bolder antagonism. And yet it was
rather the external form than the inward substance, which they
regarded; the usages of the church, rather than the dogmas, which they
assailed; the dominion rather than the teachings of the priests,
against which they rose up. The mode of conflict was also different.
Teachers were closely watched; great caution enjoined on the preachers;
attacks on points of faith not suffered either in the pulpit or in
disputations; and yet, on the other hand, fully as much freedom of
speech prevailed in private life as in Zurich: the nuns of gentle birth
in K[oe]nigsfeld left their convent and married without hindrance, and
even the head of the priestly order, Provost Nicholas von Wattenweil,
had taken to wife Clara Mai, a Dominican sister of the Convent in the
Island. Amid storms of applause, the Banneret Manuel had allowed a play
to be performed publicly in the Street of the Cross by a young burgher,
in which the church authorities, the cardinals, the traffic of
indulgences and various ceremonies were held up to ridicule. The powers
then ruling had no special esteem for the Pope, and would not tolerate
the supremacy of any bishops, but just as little also the commanding
influence of a reformer. Such a state of things could not last long in
any case, but the very means, by which the Five Cantons hoped to
prevent the breach, led directly to it. These were their assumptions of
guardianship; their legations; their letters and strictures, on every
ordinance of the Council in Bern, which they did not like; the conduct
of their envoys at the swearing of the treaty in that place; their
request that the deputies of Zurich sent for this purpose might not be
admitted to witness the ceremony; their private conferences, to which
Bern also was not invited; their incessant appeals to that sealed
promise, which had been extorted only under the protests of many and to
the dissatisfaction of a large portion of the people, a