Set apart by occupation and temperament, the middle-class man had little in common with either the servile or the ruling class; little in common with the noble who despised his birth, ridiculed his manners, envied his wealth; little with the priest who found him too rigid, too intelligent, too reserved with his money and his soul to be a good son of the Church; little with the peasant who renounced him as a renegade or ignored him as a _parvenu_. All these benefits the _bourgeois_ returned in full measure, despising the peasant for his ignorance and servility resenting the inquisitiveness of the clergy and the condescension of the nobility, at the same time that he aspired to the power of the one and the superior position of the other. And from the outside world the _bourgeois_ had secured a measure of protection. With his money he had purchased corporate independence and enfranchisement from feudal obligation. The gild, at once an industrial enterprise, a religious association, and a charitable foundation, bound him to his fellows and rounded out his life. At the close of the fifteenth century many circumstances had contributed to identify the interests of the small country gentry with those of the moderately well-to-do townsman, and to set them both in opposition to the higher nobility and the wealthier merchants and promoters. The control of trade was passing from the master merchant to the capitalist, from the city to the state. Powerful financial monopolists like the Fuggers and the Welsers, in alliance with the territorial prince or the national government, were undermining the industrial independence of town and gild. Exactions of State and Church were increasing. The growing extravagance and immorality of the wealthy, both burgher and noble, was matched by the worldliness of the upper clergy, and accompanied by the decay of spiritual interests, the accentuation of ritual and ceremony, and increased reliance upon external and formal works as sufficient for salvation. From this world of the high-placed favorites of fortune, where corruption flourished unashamed and power was too often exercised without a redeeming sense of obligation, the middle class was already withdrawing at the close of the fifteenth century. The townsmen in Germany found satisfaction for their spiritual and intellectual interests in reviving the religious activities of the gilds, and in the formation of lay religious societies in which a simplified form of worship was accompanied by study of the Bible and the preaching of the unworldly virtues of upright living. It was this separation of the _bourgeois_ from the world in which he lived that constitutes the first protest, the beginning of the Protestant movement.