His great hope for the solution of these difficulties seems to have lain in some scheme of union among Protestants. If only the Lutheran sects, Bohemian Brothers, and Calvinists would give up their quarrels with one another, religious toleration would become such an easy affair. He therefore sympathised particularly with the new proposal, which was gradually shaping itself in the discussions between the Lutherans and the Brothers. This was a plan for a new Bohemian creed, to be drawn up at a combined meeting of the various sects. The Brothers looked upon this movement with great suspicion. They saw in it an attempt of the Lutherans to secure the acceptance of the Augsburg Confession by indirect means; and they noted their persistent attempts to exclude the Brothers from those Assemblies where ecclesiastical questions were discussed. Nevertheless, when Maximilian, on his return to Bohemia in 1575, consented to preside at the Assembly in which this new creed was to be proposed, the Brothers were willing to take part in the discussion. Doctor Crato, Maximilian’s physician, secretly urged the Brothers to stand firm, assuring them that the Emperor was really in sympathy with them. Encouraged by this hint, they not only resisted a motion for the acceptance of the Augsburg Confession, but they even objected to the appointment of a committee for the preparation of formulæ which were to unite all parties. The committee was, nevertheless, appointed, and its actions soon justified the fears of the Brothers. In the introduction to the proposed creed, the committee pronounced an anathema against a number of heretics, and, amongst others, against all Calvinists. Now many of the Brothers had embraced Calvinistic doctrines; and their friendship with the champions of those doctrines had been strengthened by motives, both of personal resentment and of moral sympathy. The treatment of the exiled Brothers by the Lutherans of Prussia had repelled the Brotherhood generally from the creed of their unfriendly hosts; while the strict moral discipline maintained in the Calvinistic University of Heidelberg was more attractive to the followers of Peter of Chelc̆ic than the growing laxity of Wittenberg. They therefore offered a successful opposition to that sweeping condemnation of Calvinism to which the Lutherans desired to commit them. But this was, after all, but a minor point in the objections of the Brothers to the proposed creed. Apart from every detail, the proposal to surrender their own Confession in favour of any new form of words whatsoever, was wholly inconsistent with the position which they desired to maintain. They therefore offered such steady resistance to the proposed Confession, that they at last induced the Lutherans to consent to a petition to the King and the Assembly asking them to recognise each sect as a separate organisation. This result, however, was not reached till the controversy had become so fierce that the rival theologians came to