disposition to generate an
unmitigated hostility to all innovations in religion; a feeling which
the thought that his most formidable political opponents were also the
enemies of his faith was not calculated to weaken. As his European
possessions, scattered as they were over so many countries, were on all
sides exposed to the seductions of foreign opinions, the progress of the
Reformation in other quarters could not well be a matter of indifference
to him. His immediate interests, therefore, urged him to attach himself
devotedly to the old church, in order to close up the sources of the
heretical contagion. Thus, circumstances naturally placed this prince
at the head of the league which the Roman Catholics formed against the
Reformers. The principles which had actuated the long and active reigns
of Charles V. and Philip the Second, remained a law for their
successors; and the more the breach in the church widened, the firmer
became the attachment of the Spaniards to Roman Catholicism.

The German line of the House of Austria was apparently more unfettered;
but, in reality, though free from many of these restraints, it was yet
confined by others. The possession of the imperial throne--a dignity
it was impossible for a Protestant to hold, (for with what consistency
could an apostate from the Romish Church wear the crown of a Roman
emperor?) bound the successors of Ferdinand I. to the See of Rome.
Ferdinand himself was, from conscientious motives, heartily attached to
it. Besides, the German princes of the House of Austria were not
powerful enough to dispense with the support of Spain, which, however,
they would have forfeited by the least show of leaning towards the new
doctrines. The imperial dignity, also, required them to preserve the
existing political system of Germany, with which the maintenance of
their own authority was closely bound up, but which it was the aim of
the Protestant League to destroy. If to these grounds we add the
indifference of the Protestants to the Emperor's necessities and to the
common dangers of the empire, their encroachments on the temporalities
of the church, and their aggressive violence when they became conscious
of their own power, we can easily conceive how so many concurring
motives must have determined the emperors to the side of popery, and how
their own interests came to be intimately interwoven with those of the
Roman Church. As its fate seemed to depend altogether on the part tak