In the sixteenth century politics were theological. The groups into which men divided had religious slogans and were called churches, but they were also political parties. The years following the Diet of {96} Worms saw the crystallization of a new group, which was at first liberal and reforming and later, as it grew in stability, conservative. At Worms almost all the liberal forces in Germany had been behind Luther, the intellectuals, the common people with their wish for social amelioration, and those to whom the religious issue primarily appealed. But this support offered by public opinion was vague; in the next years it became, both more definite and more limited. At the same time that city after city and state after state was openly revolting from the pope, until the Reformers had won a large constituency in the Imperial Diets and a place of constitutional recognition, there was going on another process by which one after another certain elements at first inclined to support Luther fell away from him. During these years he violently dissociated himself from the extreme radicals and thus lost the support of the proletariat. In the second place the growing definiteness and narrowness of his dogmatism and his failure to show hospitality to science and philosophy alienated a number of intellectuals. Third, a great schism weakened the Protestant church. But these losses were counterbalanced by two gains. The first was the increasing discipline and coherence of the new churches; the second was their gradual but rapid attainment of the support of the middle and governing classes in many German states. [Sidenote: The Radicals]