When Melanchthon penned this confession only a few days had elapsed since Luther, in response to anxious letters received from Augsburg, had intervened with a firm hand and spoken out plainly against the concessions, and any further attempts at a diplomatic settlement.[1116] In obedience to these directions Melanchthon began to withdraw more and more from the position he had taken up. The most favourable proposals of his opponents were no longer entertained by him, and he even refused to fall in with the Emperor’s suggestion that Catholics living in Protestant territories should be left free to practise their religion. The Elector of Saxony’s divines, together with Melanchthon, in a memorandum to their sovereign, declared, on this occasion, that it was not sufficient for preachers to preach against the Mass, but that the Princes also must refuse to sanction it, and must forbid it. “Were we to say that Princes might abstain from forbidding it, and that preachers only were to declaim against it, one could well foresee what [small] effect the doctrine and denunciations of the preachers would have.”[1117] “The theologians,” remarks Janssen, “thus gave it distinctly to be understood that the new doctrine could not endure without the aid of the secular authority.”[1118] Hence, at that decisive moment, the Protestant Princes proclaimed intolerance of Catholics as much a matter of conscience as the confiscation of Church property. To the demand of the Emperor for restitution of the temporalities, the Princes, supported by the theologians, answered, that “they did not consider themselves bound to obey, since this matter concerned their conscience, against which there ran no prescription” (on the part of those who had been despoiled).[1119] Thus, with Melanchthon’s knowledge and approval, the two principal factors in the whole Reformation, viz. intolerance and robbery of Church property, played their part even here at the turning-point of German history. On his return from the Coburg to Wittenberg, as already described (p. 45 f.), Luther in his sermons showed how the Evangel which he proclaimed had to be preached, even at the expense of war and universal desolation: “The cry now is, that, had the Evangel not been preached, things would never have fallen out thus, but everything would have remained calm and peaceful. No, my friend, but things will improve; Christ speaks: ‘I have more things to say to you and to judge’; the fact is you must leave this preaching undisturbed, else there shall not remain to you one stick nor one stone upon another, and you may say: ‘These words are not mine, but the words of the Father.’” (cp. John viii. 26).[1120]