The contest, however, had done little more than change its place, by descending several steps. The same struggles which the emperors and popes had exhibited to the world were soon renewed on a smaller scale, in all the towns of Germany, between the bishops and the magistrates. The burghers took up the sword which the emperors had allowed to drop from their hands. As early as 1329 the burghers of Frankfort on the Oder had intrepidly withstood all their ecclesiastical superiors. Excommunicated for having continued faithful to the Margrave Louis, they had been left for twenty-eight years without mass, baptism, marriage, or Christian burial; and, when the monks and priests made their re-entry, they laughed at it as a comedy or farce,--sad symptoms, doubtless, but symptoms of which the clergy were the cause. At the period of the Reformation this opposition between the magistrates and ecclesiastics had increased. The privileges of the former, and the temporal pretensions of the latter, were constantly causing jostling and collision between the two bodies. But burgomasters, councillors, and secretaries of towns, were not the only persons among whom Rome and the clergy found opponents. Wrath was at the same time fermenting among the people, and broke out as early as 1502, when the peasantry, indignant at the grinding yoke of their ecclesiastical sovereigns, entered into a combination which goes under the name of the Shoe-Alliance. Thus everywhere, both in the upper and lower regions of society, a grumbling sound was heard,--a precursor of the thunder which was soon to burst. Germany seemed ripe for the work which the sixteenth century had received as its task. Providence, which moves leisurely, had every thing prepared, and the very passions which God condemns were to be overruled by his mighty hand for the accomplishment of his designs. Let us see how other nations were situated. Thirteen small republics, placed with their confederates in the centre of Europe among mountains, forming, as it were, its citadel, contained a brave and simple people. Who would have gone to those obscure valleys in quest of persons who, with the sons of Germany, might be the deliverers of the Church? Who would have thought that petty unknown towns, just emerging from barbarism, hid behind inaccessible mountains, at the extremity of nameless lakes, would, in point of Christianity, take precedence of Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome? Nevertheless, it so pleased Him who wills that one spot of earth be watered with dew, and that another spot on which the rain has not descended shall remain parched, (Amos.) There were other circumstances besides which might have been expected to throw numerous obstacles in the way of the Reformation among the Helvetic Republics. If, in a monarchy, the impediments of power were to be dreaded, the thing to be feared in a democracy was the precipitation of the people.