These were only the most comprehensive of a multitude of Protestant divisions. In the sixteenth century there are enumerated by ecclesiastical historians at least eighty Protestant sects, all named for certain special tenets, or after leaders who held themselves apart. The general resort to the Bible had thus revived the phenomena of the early ages of the faith; and each leading sect or church within its own sphere sought in the papal fashion to suppress variation. The result was a maximum of dogmatism and malice. Every sect split into many. Thus there were some thirteen groups of Anabaptists; over thirty separate confessions were drawn up among the main bodies; and Luther enumerated nine varieties of doctrine on the eucharist alone. The doctrine seldomest broached was that of mutual toleration. Between Lutherans and Calvinists the quarrel went so far that when John Laski, the learned Polish Calvinist, was sailing from England to the continent on his expulsion with his adherents from England under Mary, he was refused leave to remain at the Lutheran ports of Elsinore, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Rostock. But as time went on the Lutherans were divided endlessly and irreconcilably on doctrinal issues among themselves. Melanchthon died declaring the gladness with which he passed away from a world filled with the rabid hatreds of theologians; and after his day matters grew worse instead of better. From the very first, in short, the temper of Protestant propaganda, met as it was by brutal resistance, had been one of brutal animosity. There is indeed no more grotesque spectacle in human history than the association of the phrase "a religion of love" with the masses of furious controversy which constitute the bulk of Christian theological literature in all ages of faith. Amenity has been much rarer in religious strife than in actual warfare, where animal good humour could at times mitigate or overlay animal hate. Fighters could meet and banquet after a fight: theologians could not. They could feel kindly towards those only who joined them in hating the foe. England, with her Pecock and her Hooker, makes as good a show in this matter as any other country; but in England the temper of the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism is from the first one of intense hate, the cultured Catholic Sir Thomas More showing as little capacity for gentleness of spirit as do the violent assailants who exasperated him. Bale, a typical Protestant polemist, seems habitually to foam at the mouth. War was the natural and inevitable expression of such hatreds wherever it could come about; and when the establishment of Protestantism left the sectarian spirit free play as between sects, they turned to the new debate all the ferocity that had marked the old.