In regard to Religion, the results were much more important to the world. Both Calvinists and Lutherans received entire freedom of worship and equal civil rights with the Catholics. Ferdinand II.'s "Edict of Restitution" was withdrawn, and the territories which had been secularized up to the year 1624 were not given back to the Church. Universal amnesty was decreed for everything which had happened during the war, except for the Austrian Protestants, whose possessions were not restored to them. The Emperor retained the authority of deciding questions of war and peace, taxation, defences, alliances, &c. with the concurrence of the Diet: he acknowledged the absolute sovereignty of the several Princes in their own States, and conceded to them the right of forming alliances among themselves or with foreign powers! A special article of the treaty prohibited all persons from writing, speaking or teaching anything contrary to its provisions. [Sidenote: 1648.] The Pope (at that time Innocent X.) declared the Treaty of Westphalia null and void, and issued a bull against its observance. The parties to the treaty, however, did not allow this bull to be published in Germany. The Catholics in all parts of the country (except Austria, Styria and the Tyrol) had suffered almost as severely as the Protestants, and would have welcomed the return of peace upon any terms which simply left their faith free. Nothing shows so conclusively how wantonly and wickedly the Thirty Years' War was undertaken than the fact that the Peace of 1648, in a religious point of view, yielded even more to the Protestants than the Religious Peace of Augsburg, granted by Charles V. in 1555. After a hundred years, the Church of Rome, acting through its tools, the Hapsburg Emperors, was forced to give up the contest: the sword of slaughter was rusted to the hilt by the blood it had shed, and yet religious freedom was saved to Germany. It was not zeal for the spread of Christian truth which inspired this fearful Crusade against twenty-five millions of Protestants, for the Catholics equally acknowledged the authority of the Bible: it was the despotic determination of the Roman Church to rule the minds and consciences of all men, through its Pope and its priesthood.