The Reformation met with difficulties in the principality of Anhalt, but the young princes who now ruled the two duchies of which the principality consisted, had had a pious mother, and the seed which her hand had sown in their hearts overcame all obstacles. One of the princes, Wolfgang, had held intercourse with Luther as early as 1522 and had, as we have seen, most willingly signed the Confession of Augsburg.[490] The other three, however, had not followed his example. John, on the contrary, had signed the Compromise of Augsburg, and it was not easy for him to draw back. Surrounded by powerful neighbors entirely devoted to Rome, the elector of Brandenburg, Duke George of Saxony, and the archbishop elector of Mentz, it seemed scarcely possible for them to extricate themselves from the net. Joachim was of a feeble and gloomy temper. Moreover, Prince George was an ecclesiastic at the age of eleven, a canon of Merseburg since 1524, and provost of the chapter of Magdeburg, and seemed to be called to the highest offices of the church. He was born at Dessau in 1501. From his childhood he had shown a strong attachment to church ceremonies and to the traditions of the fathers; and the doctrines of Luther were afterwards depicted to him in the blackest colors. 'This man,' they told him, 'proscribes good books, authorizes bad ones, and abolishes all the holy ordinances. All his followers are Donatists and Wickliffites.' He was henceforth a vehement opponent of a system which, according to his judgment, was destructive of Christianity. When the ministers of Magdeburg attempted to win over the members of the Chapter to the Reformation, he roughly rebuked them. As he was an honest man and was desirous of qualifying himself to contend against the errors of the Protestants, he began to search for arguments in the Holy Scriptures and in the fathers of the church, but it was not possible for him to find any. On the contrary, he was utterly astonished to find that Holy Scripture was opposed to many of the established customs of the church; and that in what was called the new doctrine there were many articles which were found in the Bible, and which had been held by the fathers. His mother, although she continued in the church and counselled her sons not to violate its unity, had believed that she was saved by grace alone, and had with special emphasis professed this faith at the time of her death. George had embraced this faith at an early age; and the bishop of Merseburg had confirmed him in it by rebuking one day a preacher who had exalted human merits, and to whom he had said energetically: 'Not a single living man is righteous.' He repeated the words three times in the presence of George; and now George found the doctrine distinctly asserted in the sacred writings. He wondered within himself whether it could be on this account that the friends of Rome spoke of the Bible as a heretical book and forbade people to read it. But at other times