Du Bellay saw that there lay the knot of the affair, and he made haste to cut it. The clergy of France had just given the king a considerable sum: could a better use be made of it than this? The French envoy let Philip know that he might obtain from his master the subsidies he needed. But more must be done: he must take advantage of the opportunity to bring together the two most enterprising princes of the epoch. If they saw and heard one another, they would like each other and bind themselves in such a manner that the union of France and protestant Germany would be effected at last. Philip of Hesse received all these overtures with delight. [Sidenote: LUTHER OPPOSES THE WAR.] But fresh obstacles now intervened. The theologians of the Reformation detested these foreign alliances and wars, which, in their opinion, defiled the holiest of causes. Luther and Melanchthon waited upon the elector, conjuring him to oppose the landgrave's rash enterprise; and Du Bellay found the two reformers employing as much zeal to prevent the union of Francis and Philip as he to accomplish it. 'Go,' said the elector to Luther and Melanchthon, 'and prevail upon the landgrave to change his mind.' The two doctors, on their way from Wittemberg to Weimar, where they would meet Philip, conversed about their mission and the landgrave: 'He is an intelligent prince,' said Luther, 'all animation and impulse, and of a joyous heart. He has been able to maintain order in his country, so that Hesse, which is full of forests and mountains where robbers might find shelter, sees its inhabitants travelling and roaming about, buying and selling without fear.... If one of them is attacked and robbed, forthwith the landgrave falls upon the bandits and punishes them. He is a true man of war—an Arminius. His star never deceives him, and he is much dreaded by all his adversaries.'[537] 'And I too,' said Melanchthon, 'love the _Macedonian_' (for so he called Philip of Hesse, because, in his opinion, that prince had all the shrewdness and courage of his namesake of Macedon); 'for that reason,' he added, 'I am unwilling that, being so high, he should risk so great a fall.'[538] The two theologians had no doubt that a war undertaken against the powerful house of Austria would end in a frightful catastrophe to the protestants.