"
They, in conclusion, very politely informed King Henry IV. himself, that
if he wished to unite with them, he must sign their creed. This was
sincerity, honesty, but it was the sincerity and honesty of minds but
partially disinthralled from the bigotry of the dark ages. While the
Protestants were thus unhappily disunited, the pope cooeperated with the
emperor, and wheeled all his mighty forces into the line to recover the
ground which the papal church had lost. Several of the more enlightened
of the Protestant princes, seeing all their efforts paralyzed by
disunion, endeavored to heal the schism. But the Lutheran leaders would
not listen to the Calvinists, nor the Calvinists to the Lutherans, and
the masses, as usual, blindly followed their leaders.
Several of the Calvinist princes and nobles, the Lutherans refusing to
meet with them, united in a confederacy at Heilbrun, and drew up a long
list of grievances, declaring that, until they were redressed, they
should withhold the succors which the emperor had solicited to repel the
Turks. Most of these grievances were very serious, sufficiently so to
rouse men to almost any desperation of resistance. But it would be
amusing, were it not humiliating, to find among them the complaint that
the pope had changed the calendar from the Julian to the Gregorian.
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