Though the division of the country into two camps by their religious differences enabled princes to play off one part of the people against another in the interests of their own rivalries and ambitions, yet the contests were mostly made to wear the appearance of struggles for the securing of spiritual or civil freedom. And all the misery brought about by them was not therefore unfruitful of good. Though the points in dispute between the rival creeds were often nugatory, though the better sense was not invariably on the side of the reformers, and though good men lamented that Church reform had quitted its proper sphere and duties, when it allied itself with worldly policy and descended from the pulpit into the camp and the battle field, yet even so, and even then, the Reformation was preparing the great career which it has run, and that still before it, from which no man can ever more turn it back. [Sidenote: THE INTERIM.] Charles the Fifth was just then busy in imposing his "Interim" on the German cities. The great council at Trent, which was to "heal the wounds of Christendom," made but small progress in that business; manifested, indeed, a fertility of resource in the discovery of means how not to do any thing of the sort, perfectly marvellous. And Charles, who was perfectly earnest in wishing that these wounds should be healed, or at all events closed up in some sort, for reasons of his own, very much of the nature of those which make a coachman wish that his team may be coupled up, so as to draw well together, became impatient. It struck his royal mind, that the thing must be easy enough if one only went about it in a simple straightforward manner. So he ordered three divines,—Julius Pflug and Helding, on the Catholic side, and one Agricola, a "practical" man, inclined, when he got his cue, to make things pleasant, on the Protestant side,—to draw up a scheme of a good working religion, such as all men might accept without objection,—or despite objection, if it came to that; and to be quick about it. On the 15th of May, 1548, his Majesty was gracious enough to lay the scheme so drawn before the diet; whereupon the Elector of Mentz declared it to be as good a religion as any man need wish for; and being an Archbishop, it was clear that he must know. And this was the celebrated Interim; so named because it professed only to be a provisional faith, for men to live and die—and pay their taxes—by, till such time as what they really were definitively to believe could be got settled for them in a more regular and formal manner. The indignation and disgust felt at Rome by the regular practitioners at such quack–Pope practice as this, may be easily imagined. The regular–bred Pope examined his rivals' prescription, and found, as we hear without surprise, "seven or eight heresies in it,"[89] all clear and evident like so many false quantities in a school–boy's verse task. Evidently a most unworkmanlike production!