The German Constitution

[p. 568]

|568| War this interest still came to the fore, not so much on the side of the powers against one another as in popular opinion, and has not failed of its effect. A kind of mistrust always remained, and if the Protestants saw themselves not attacked as such, they still always feared the possibility; they still always credited the House of Austria with the will, the height of bigotry and an influence of the new, yielding pope, of the Jesuits and priests in general, as soon as it should be in a position to do so, and they saw in Prussia the guarantor and, if the case of need should really arise, the saviour of their freedom of faith and conscience.

The petty and, in its purpose, fanatical policy of the Jesuits has long since ceased to be the policy of the courts. Especially since the times of Joseph II this apprehension has vanished from the Protestants. The procedure of Joseph II was not merely the whim of a single monarch, which may die out again with his death²⁶⁾, but his successors have both retained these very principles, and they have also generally passed into the firm, universal mass of culture and principles of state.

26) In the margin: like the Edict of Nantes, Richelieu’s relation, what [Emperor] Matthias did for the Protestants of his country

Also what was later still especially an object of interest of the Protestant part of the princes of the Empire, the relations of the Protestants in the Palatinate, the only remnant contradicting the principles of our time, has now been removed. The spirit of the times, the procedure of governments, which has become firm and turned into principles, has astonishingly diminished the importance of the corporis evangelicorum and with it also of its principal head.

The mania of the Catholic estates to procure the supremacy for the Catholic religion has fallen away, and with it also the crooked means which were formerly used to move German princes of the Empire to convert to the Catholic religion, and which aroused in the Protestants so astonishingly

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