ondemnation of the Calvinistical errors; and to declare our
public decision that false principles should not be covered with the
semblance of exterior union, and tolerated under pretense of the right
of private judgment, but that all should submit to the Word of God, as
the only rule to which their faith and instructions should be
conformable."

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.

By the Julian calendar, or Old Style as it was called, the solar year
was estimated at three hundred and sixty-five days and six hours; but it
exceeds this by about eleven minutes. As no allowance was made for these
minutes, which amount to a day in about one hundred and thirty years,
the current year had, in process of ages, advanced ten days beyond the
real time. Thus the vernal equinox, which really took place on the 10th
of March, was assigned in the calendar to the 21st. To rectify this
important error the New Style, or Gregorian calendar, was introduced, so
called from Pope Gregory XII. Ten days were dropped after the 4th of
October, 1582, and the 5th was called the 15th. This reform of the
calendar, correct and necessary as it was, was for a long time adopted
only by the Ca