in the Catholic sense, vaguely agreed to the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, and declared that the two questions of the Communion in both kinds and the celibacy of clergy were to be left till the summoning of a free Christian council. The strict Lutheran party--and Pomerania was a stronghold of strict Lutheranism--regarded the Interim as a base betrayal of Protestant interests. Their pamphleteers called it the Interitum, or the death-blow, and the conversion of a prince like Joachim of Brandenburg to such a scheme was regarded as an ominous sign for the future.

In reality, however, the success of the emperor rested upon the most brittle foundations. That he was chilly, reserved, un-German, and therefore unpopular was something, but not nearly all. The princes of Germany had conquered practical independence in the thirteenth century, and were jealous of their prerogatives. The Hanseatic towns formed a republican confederacy in the north, corresponding to the Swiss confederacy in the south. There was no adequate central machinery, and the Jesuit order was only just preparing to enter upon its career of German victories. The Spanish troops made themselves detestable, outraging women--a dire offence in a nation so domestic as Germany--and there was standing feud between the famous Castilian infantry and the German lansquenets. The popes did not like the emperor's favourite remedy of a council, and busily thwarted his ecclesiastical schemes. Henry II of France was on the watch for German allies against a powerful rival. The allies were ready. A great spiritual movement can never be stifled by the issue of one battle. For good or evil, men had taken sides; interests intellectual, moral, and material had already been invested either in the one cause or the other; there had been brutal iconoclasm; there had been ardent preaching, so simple and moving that ignorant women understood and wept; there had been close and stubborn dogmatic controversy; there had been the shedding of blood, and the upheavals in towns, and the building of a new church system, and the growth of a new religious literature. Almost a whole generation had now been consumed in this controversy, a controversy which touched all lives, and cemented or divided families. The children were reading Luther's Bible, and singing Luther's hymns, and learning Luther's short catechism. Could it be expected that such a river should suddenly lose itself in the sand? Nevertheless there is something surprising in the quick revolution of the story. In 1550 Maurice of Saxony intrigues with the Protestants, and in the following year definitely goes over to their side. In 1552 the emperor has to flee for his life, and the Peace of Passau seals the victory of the Protestant cause.

One of the first provinces to be conquered for Lutheranism was the duchy of Pomerania. John Bugenhagen, himself a Pomeranian and the historian of Pomerania, was the chief apostle of this northern region, and those who visit the Baltic churches will often see his sable portrait hanging side by side with Huss and Luther on the whitewashed walls. Sastrow gives us an excellent picture of the various forces which co-operated with the teaching of Bugenhagen to effect the change. In Eastern Pomerania there was the violent propaganda of Dr. Amandus, who wanted a clean sweep of images, princes, and established powers. There was the democratic movement in Stralsund, led by the turbulent Rolof Moller, who, accusing the council of malversation, revolutionized the constitution of his city. There was the mob of workmen who were only too glad of an excuse to plunder the priests and break the altars. But side by side with greed and violence there was the moral revolt against "the fables, the absurdities, and the impious lies" of the pulpit, and against the vices of priest and monk. The recollection of the early days of Puritan enthusiasm, when the fathers of the Protestant movement preached the gospel to large crowds in the open air, as, for instance, under "St. George's churchyard elm" at Stralsund, remained graven on many a lowly calendar. Even the texts of these sermons were remembered as epochs in spiritual life. Sastrow records how, ceding to the request of a great number of burgesses, Mr. Ketelhot (being detained in the port of Stralsund by contrary winds), preached upon Matthew xi. 28: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest"; and then upon John xvi. 23: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name, He will give it you"; and, finally: "Go ye therefore and teach all nations." The general pride in civic monuments proved to be stronger than the iconoclastic mood. Certainly the high altar in the Nicolai Kirche at Stralsund--probably the most elaborate specimen of late fifteenth-century wood carving which still survives in Germany--would have received a short shrift from Cromwell's Ironsides.

It was Burgomaster Nicholas Smiterlow, of Stralsund, who brought Protestantism into the Sastrow family. He had seen Luther in 1523, had heard him preach at Wittenberg, and became a convert to the "true gospel." Smiterlow's daughter Anna married Nicholas Sastrow, a prosperous brewer and cornfactor of Greifswald, and Nicholas deserted the mass for the sermon. Their eldest son, John, was sent to study at Wittenberg, where he made the acquaintance of Luther and Melanchthon. He became something, of a scholar, wrote in praise of the English divine, Robert Barns, and was crowned poet laureate by Charles V in 1544. The second son was Bartholomew, author of these memoirs. Three years after his arrival the family life at Greifswald was rudely disturbed. Bartholomew's father had the misfortune to commit manslaughter (uncharitable people called it murder), and Greifswald was made too hot to hold the peccant cornfactor. The father of our chronicler lived in banishment for several years, while his wife brought up the children at Greifswald, and carried on the family business. It happened that Bartholomew's great-uncle, Burgomaster Nicholas Smiterlow the second, of Stralsund, was at that time residing at Greifswald. He possessed the avuncular virtues, had his great-nephew taught Latin, and earned his eternal gratitude. In time the heirs of the slain man were appeased and 1,000 marks of blood-money enabled the elder Sastrow to return to his native city. He did not, however, remain long in Greifswald, but sold his house and settled in the neighbouring city of Stralsund, the home of his wife's relations. Bartholomew received his early education at Greifswald and Stralsund, but in 1538 was sent to Rostock (a university had been founded in this town in 1415), where he studied under two well-known pupils of Luther and Melanchthon, Burenius and Heinrich Welfius (Wulf). The teaching combined the chief elements of Humanism and of Protestant theology, the works of Cicero and Terence on the one hand, and the De Anima of Melanchthon on the other.

Meanwhile (1534-37) there were great disturbances in Stralsund. An ambitious demagogue of Lubeck, George Wullenweber, had involved the Hanseatic League in a Danish war. Smiterlow and Nicolas Sastrow thought that the war was wrong and foolish, and that it would endanger the interests of Stralsund. But a democracy, when once bitten by the war frenzy, is hard to curb, and regards moderation in the light of treason. Stralsund rose against its conservative council, forced Smiterlow to resign and compelled the elder Sastrow to remain a prisoner in his house for the period of a year. Father and son never forgot or forgave these years of plebeian uproar. For them the art of statesmanship was to avoid revolution and to keep the people under. "I recommend to my children submission to authority, no matter whether Pilate or Caiaphas governs." This was the last word of Bartholomew's political philosophy.

In 1535-6 the forces of the Hanse were defeated both by land and sea, and the war party saw the error of its ways. Sastrow was