PROTESTANT STATE SCHOOL ORGANIZATION. We see here in German lands a new, and, for the future, a very important tendency. Throughout all the long Middle Ages the Church had absolutely controlled all education. From the suppression of the pagan schools, in 529 A.D., to the time of the Reformation there had been no one to dispute with the Church its complete monopoly of education. Even Charlemagne's attempt at the stimulation of educational activity had been clearly within the lines of church control. Until the beginnings of the modern States, following the Crusades, the Church had been the State as well, and for long humbled any ruler who dared dispute its power. In the later Middle Ages nobles and rising parliaments had at times sided with the king against the Church--warnings of a changing Europe that the Church should have heeded--but there had been no serious trouble with the rising nationalities before the sixteenth century. Now, in Protestant lands, all was changed. The authority of the Church was overthrown. By the Peace of Augsburg (1555) each German prince and town and knight were to be permitted to make choice between the Catholic and Lutheran faith, and all subjects were to accept the faith of their ruler or emigrate. This established freedom of conscience for the rulers, but for no one else. It also gave them control of both religious and secular affairs, thus uniting in the person of the ruler, large or small, control of both Church and State. This was as much progress toward religious freedom as the world was then ready for, as Church and State had been united for so many centuries that a complete separation of the two was almost inconceivable. It was left for the United States (1787) to completely divorce Church and State, and to reduce the churches to the control of purely spiritual affairs. The German rulers, however, were now free to develop schools as they saw fit, and, through their headship of the Church in their principality or duchy or city, to control education therein. We have here the beginnings of the transfer of educational control from the Church to the State, the ultimate fruition of which came first in German lands, and which was to be the great work of the nineteenth century. It was through the kingly or ducal headship of the Church, and through it of the educational system of the kingdom or duchy, that the great educational development in Würtemberg, Saxony, and Gotha was brought about by their rulers, and it was through the ruling princes that the German Universities were reformed [10] and the new Protestant universities established. [11] Even in Catholic States, as Bavaria, the German state-control idea took root early. Many of the important features of the modern German school systems are to be seen in their beginnings in these Lutheran state-church schools. [Illustration: FIG. 96. EVOLUTION OF GERMAN STATE SCHOOL CONTROL] 2. _Anglican foundations_