eration
for Protestant subjects in the land of such a prince. All claims of
spiritual jurisdiction by Catholic prelates in Lutheran lands were to
cease. All estates of the church confiscated prior to 1552 were to
remain in the hands of the spoliators, all seized since that date to be
restored.

The Peace of Augsburg, like the Missouri Compromise, only postponed
civil war and the radical solution of a pressing problem. But as we
cannot rightly censure the statesmen of 1820 for not insisting on
emancipation, for which public opinion was not yet prepared, so it
would be unhistorical and unreasonable to blame the Diet of Augsburg
for not granting the complete toleration which we now see was bound to
come and was ideally the right thing. Mankind is educated slowly and
by many hard experiences. Europe had lain so long under the domination
of an authoritative ecclesiastical civilization that the possibility of
complete toleration hardly occurred to any but a few eccentrics. And
we must not minimize what the Peace of Augsburg actually accomplished.
It is true that choice of religion was legally limited to two
alternatives, but this was more than had been allowed before.
[Sidenote: Actual results] It is true that freedom of even this choice
was complete only for the rulers of the territories or Free Cities;
private citizens might exercise the same choice only on leaving their
homes. The hardship of this was somewhat lessened by the consideration
that in any case the nonconformist would not have to go far before
finding a German community holding the Catholic or Lutheran opinions he
preferred. Finally, it must be remembered that, if the Peace of
Augsburg aligned the whole nation into two mutually hostile camps, it
at least kept them from war for more than {132} half a century. Nor
was this a mere accident, for the strain was at times severe. When the
imperial knight, Grumbach, broke the peace by sacking the city of
Wuerzburg, [Sidenote: 1563-7] he was put under the ban, captured and
executed. His protector, Duke John Frederic of Saxony, was also
captured and kept in confinement in Austria until his death.

Notwithstanding such an exhibition of centralized power, it is probable
that the Peace of Augsburg increased rather than diminished the
authority of the territorial states at the expense of the imperial
government. Charles V, worn out by his long and unsuccessful struggle
with heresy, after giving the Netherlands