After the pacification of Ratisbon many, who had concealed their opinions, now came boldly forward and declared for the great truths of the Reformation. Princes, nobles, various regions and towns of Germany, year after year, professed without fear to have given up the old faith, and to have embraced the new doctrines.
An event, in its origin purely political, which occurred at this period, was so overruled, as to increase greatly the strength of the Reformers. In the year 1519, Ulrich, Duke of Wurtemberg, gave offense to the league of Swabia, and was expelled from his dominions, which were afterward placed under the scepter of Ferdinand. The exiled prince, after a long captivity of seventeen years, was restored, through the assistance of his kinsman, Philip of Hesse, to the dukedom of his ancestors. It appears that he attended the conferences at Marburg in 1529, and had received impressions favorable to the Reformation. "Hence," says Scultetus, "his first object on the recovery of his dominions, was to throw them open to the glory of Christ, and to introduce the preaching of the pure word of God, and the administration of the sacraments, according to His institution." He also engaged the assistance of several theologians to organize churches, establish schools, and arrange other details on the principles of Protestantism. This must have been like life from the dead to those extensive dominions which had been under the sway of the bigoted catholic Ferdinand.
The Reformation of the Duchy of Wurtemberg, was followed by that of Brunswick, Calenberg, Hanover, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and the cities of Augsburg, Bremen, and Hamburg. But there was one accession to the Protestant cause about this time which demands a special notice as illustrating the overruling providence of God in those eventful times.
On the 24th of April, 1539, George, Duke of Saxony, died. He was head of the Albertine branch of the Saxony family and possessed, as Marquis of Mesnea and Thuringia, extensive territories comprising Dresden, Leipsic, and other cities now the most considerable in the electorate. From the dawn of the Reformation he had been the most resolute and determined enemy of what he styled Lutheranism. It is probable that his opposition at first was from a sincere belief in the doctrines of Romanism; but it became embittered by personal antipathy to Luther, and by the electoral princes, the other branch of the family, being his unfailing friends. By his death without issue, the succession fell to his brother Henry, whose attachment to the doctrines of the Reformation surpassed, if possible, that of his brother George to the papacy. Like Ulrich, he invited some Protestant divines, and among them Luther himself, to meet him at Leipsic. In the course of a few weeks the whole system of ancient rites was over-turned, and the full exercise of the Reformed religion established; and that with the universal applause of his subjects.
This was an event of great advantage to the Reformation. It removed an inveterate enemy from the. very center of the Reformed states, and converted that which had been a point of weakness into a position of strength. These providential, yet mysterious, accessions greatly strengthened the Smalcald league, extending the boundaries, and increasing the numbers of the Protestants. The territories of the princes, and cities attached to their cause now extended, in one great and almost unbroken line, from the shores of the Baltic to the banks of the Rhine.