In 1529 Melanchthon, at Luther’s desire, accompanied the Elector of Saxony to the Diet of Spires. The protest there made by the Lutheran Princes and Estates again caused him great concern as he foresaw the unhappy consequences to Germany of the rupture it betokened, and the danger in which it involved the Protestant cause. The interference of the Zwinglians in German affairs also filled him with apprehension, for of their doctrines, so far as they were opposed to those of Wittenberg, he cherished a deep dislike imbibed from Luther. The political alliance which, at Spires, the Landgrave of Hesse sought to promote between the two parties, appeared to him highly dangerous from the religious point of view. He now regretted that he had formerly allowed himself to be more favourably disposed to Zwinglianism by the Landgrave. In his letters he was quite open in the expression of his annoyance at the results of the Diet of Spires, though he himself had there done his best to increase the falling away from Catholicism, and, with words of peace on his lips, to render the estrangement irremediable. In his first allusion to the now famous protest he speaks of it as a “horrid thing.”[1078] His misgivings increased after his return home, and he looked forward to the future with anxiety. He was pressing in his monitions against any alliance with the Zwinglians. On May 17, 1529, he wrote to Hieronymus Baumgärtner, a member of the Nuremberg Council: “Some of us do not scorn an alliance with the [Zwinglian] Strasburgers, but do you do your utmost to prevent so shameful a thing.”[1079] “The pains of hell have encompassed me,” so he describes to a friend his anxieties. We have delayed too long, “I would rather die than see ours defiled by an alliance with the Zwinglians.”[1080] “I know that the Zwinglian doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ is untrue and not to be answered for before God.”[1081] After he had assisted Luther in the religious discussion held at Marburg between him and Zwingli in the autumn of 1529, and had witnessed the fruitless termination of the conference, he again voiced his intense grief at the discord rampant among the innovators, and the hopelessness of any effort to reunite Christians. “I am quite unable to mitigate the pains I suffer on account of the position of ecclesiastical affairs,” so he complains to Camerarius. “Not a day passes that I do not long for death. But enough of this, for I do not dare to describe in this letter the actual state of things.”[1082]