he religious schism was the great obstacle in the way
of his realizing this design. As the temporal head of the Catholic world
he was still more strongly bent to heal the breaches of Catholicism. But
he had no wish to insist on an unconditional submission to the Papacy.
He believed that there were evils to be cured on the one side as on the
other; and Charles saw the high position which awaited him if as Emperor
he could bring about a reformation of the Church and a reunion of
Christendom. Violent as Luther's words had been, the Lutheran princes
and the bulk of Lutheran theologians had not yet come to look on
Catholicism as an irreconcileable foe. Even on the papal side there was
a learned and active party, a party headed by Contarini and Pole, whose
theological sympathies went in many points with the Lutherans, and who
looked to the winning back of the Lutherans as the needful prelude to
any reform in the doctrine and practice of the Church; while Melancthon
was as hopeful as Contarini that such a reform might be wrought and the
Church again become universal. In his proposal of a Council to carry on
the double work of purification and reunion therefore Charles stood out
as the representative of the larger part both of the Catholic and the
Protestant world. Against such a proposal however Rome struggled hard.
All her tradition was against Councils, where the assembled bishops had
in earlier days asserted their superiority to the Pope, and where the
Emperor who convened the assembly and carried out its decrees rose into
dangerous rivalry with the Papacy. Crushed as he was, Clement the
Seventh throughout his lifetime held the proposal of a Council
stubbornly at bay. But under his successor, Paul the Third, the
influence of Contarini and the moderate Catholics secured a more
favourable reception of plans of reconciliation. In April, 1541,
conferences for this purpose were in fact opened at Augsburg in which
Contarini, as Papal legate, accepted a definition of the moot question
of justifications by faith which satisfied Bucer and Melancthon. On the
other side, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Brandenburg
publicly declared that they believed it possible to come to terms on the
yet more vexed questions of the Mass and the Papal supremacy.

[Sidenote: Charles and Henry.]

Never had the reunion of the world seemed so near; and the hopes that
were stirring found an echo in England as well as in Germany. We can
hardly d