What then shall Your Majesty do? Have you more contemporary approval or greater strength or other means and opportunities [to this end] than your predecessors? Or do you perceive such a large following or improvement in one or the other party; or shall you allow yourself to be persuaded by the pope and other foreign nations and rulers to fall in with their unfitting, sudden attacks and silently watch and suffer them gradually [as they] insinuate and establish their stratagems to divide and ruin the Empire? Or shall you let the reins out of your hands and make no use of your Imperial office, and without taking any action or [giving any] support let everything deteriorate into greater confusion and collapse, ultimately to its final destruction?
God Almighty has opened the eyes of Your Majesty’s spirit and conscience so far that you are not simply ignorantly and blindly in favor of the Roman religion, as are many other rulers, who see no further and know no more than what their confessors tell them. Rather, Your Majesty knows how to find out whether we now have a single, true, indubitable religion and confession of faith and worship, namely the old, genuine, catholic and apostolic religion
[ . . . ]. In the Roman church, however, much superstition and idolatry and many abuses have taken hold, so that almost the entire religion has come down to external ceremonies, church discipline, and clerical power and privilege, and the accurate, true teaching of the Holy Gospel and genuine inner worship have been oppressed, obscured, and all but extinguished.
Likewise, Your Majesty is not so blinded, ignorant, or bitter about the changes that have occurred in religious matters in response to the abuses of the Roman church that you view it all as heresy and, like so many other rulers, only strive and plot to this end: how one might root it out and destroy it, and, indiscriminately approving all the doings and character of the Roman church, how one might support, compensate, and build the latter up again.
Therefore, [Your Majesty] is well able to judge the disorder, disobedience, and intrusions that have become established and have taken hold, in addition to [the aforementioned] changes, under the appearance and guise of sectarian free will and not to approve or endorse any of these in any way.
[God has helped the emperor to obtain his insights, to his “great talent,” so that he might avert “looming betrayals,” ensure peace in the Fatherland, and work toward religious conciliation. He should demonstrate that his intentions are “sincere, generous, and paternal.” Like a physician, he should allow time and nature to work, strengthen the latter and avert injury to it, and take precautions against impending disaster as one constructs dikes against storm tides. Schwendi again cites the example of Emperor Ferdinand I (6).]
It is of the greatest importance that Your Majesty assiduously, uprightly, and impartially maintain the religious and territorial peace, [treating] both sides alike, the Catholic and the Evangelical, insofar as each has just cause [ . . . ], so that in these dangerous times internecine distrust does not break out into violence and public disturbance and everything possible might be done to foil all foreign and secret plots.
(6) That is, Maximilian’s father – trans.
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