Naturally the attitude of the Emperor was a great disappointment to the Lutherans, and it caused much alarm and fear among them. From the very beginning they had declared themselves ready in the interest of peace, to do whatever they could "with God and conscience." And this remained their position to the very last. They dreaded war, and were determined to leave no stone unturned towards avoiding this calamity. In this interest even Philip of Hesse was prepared to go to the very limits of possibility. Melanchthon wrote: "The Landgrave deports himself with much restraint. He has openly declared to me that in order to preserve peace, he would accept even sterner conditions, as long as he did not thereby disgrace the Gospel." (_C. R._ 2, 254.) But a denial of God, conscience, and the Gospel was precisely what the Emperor expected. Hence the Lutherans refer to his demands as cruel, impossible of fulfilment, and as a breach of promise. Outraged by the Emperor's procedure, and fearing for his own safety, the Landgrave secretly left the Diet on August 6. War seemed inevitable to many. The reading of the Confutation had shattered the last hopes of the Lutherans for a peaceful settlement. They said so to each other, and wrote it to those at home, though not all of them in the lachrymose tone of the vacillating Melanchthon, who, filled with a thousand fears was temporarily more qualified for depriving others of their courage than for inspiring courage. (Plitt, 24.) 49. Sustained by Luther. In these days of severe trials and sore distress the Lutherans were sustained by the comforting letters of Luther and the bracing consciousness that it was the divine truth itself which they advocated. And the reading of the Confutation had marvelously strengthened this conviction. Brueck reports an eyewitness of the reading of the Augustana as saying: "The greater portion among them [the Papists] is not so ignorant as not to have seen long ago that they are in error." (Plitt, 18.) Because of this conviction there was, as Melanchthon reported, a "marvelous congratulation" among the Lutherans after the reading of the Confutation. "We stand for the divine truth, which God cannot but lead to victory, while our opponents are condemned by their own consciences," --such was the buoying conviction of the Lutherans. And in this the powerful letters of Luther strengthened the confessors at Augsburg. He wrote: "This is the nature of our Christian doctrine, that it must be held and grasped as certain and that every one must think and be convinced: The doctrine is true and sure indeed and cannot fail. But whoever falls to reasoning and begins to waver within himself, saying: My dear friend, do you believe that it is true, etc.? such a heart will never be a true Christian." (Plitt, 12.)