[p. 569]
|569| much fear and apprehension. The Catholic side no longer sets any value on it, because the state has already in itself learned to separate itself from the church, and experience has also shown that such means produced more bad effect of mistrust and increase of obstinacy than real benefit. Soon, with regard to religion, the person of the prince was separated from the country. Even if the prince became Catholic, the relation of the country to the Imperial Diet remained Protestant; indeed the prince, on his conversion to the Catholic religion, lost power in his Protestant country, not only because of the mistrust in general which arose from it, but the influence which a Protestant prince has over the church affairs of his country was taken from him by reversals and the like, and he is placed in the relation of the Catholic prince of a Catholic country, in which the church is wholly independent of the secular power in regard to its goods, the filling of offices and other arrangements, whereas the Protestant prince of a Protestant country is head and bishop at once. Catholic princely houses have also in more recent times again [become Protestant].
Because such means have fallen away on the Catholic side, the order of the Jesuits has been abolished, toleration has been introduced in the Catholic countries themselves, and civil rights have been granted to the Protestants, contrary to the narrow-hearted provisions of the Peace of Westphalia, the long lists which teachers of public law [gave] of the conversion of Protestant princes to the Catholic religion, the exposition of the cunning of the Jesuits, the depiction of the oppression and afflictions of the Protestants in Catholic [countries] have become historical objects of things past and no longer bugbears for the present.
Through the power of foreign assistance the Protestants have for longer been freed from the fear of seeing their faith suppressed
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