CHAPTER XVIII
Zwingli: The Reformation in Switzerland
1477–1531

MULTUM IN PARVO

THE success of the Swiss cantons in repelling the assault of Charles the Bold (1477) strengthened their Confederation, fired their pride of nationality, and steeled them to withstand the attempt of Maximilian to subject them in fact as well as in theory to the Holy Roman Empire. Disputes over the division of the spoils after the defeat of Burgundy brought the cantons close to civil war; but at the Diet of Stans (1481) a hermit philosopher, Nikolaus von der Flüe—Brader Klaus in Swiss memory—persuaded them to peace.

Canton by canton the sturdy Confederation grew. Fribourg and Solothurn were admitted in 1481, Basel and Schaffhausen in 1501, Appenzell in 1513; now they were thirteen, all speaking German dialects, except that French too was spoken in Fribourg and Bern. They formed a federal republic: each canton regulated its internal affairs, but was governed in its external relations by a common legislature. The single chamber of this federal diet was composed of an equal number of deputies from each canton. Democracy was not complete; several cantons appropriated minor communities as voteless vassals. Nor was Switzerland as yet a model lover of peace. In 1500–12 the cantons took advantage of Italian disruption to seize Bellinzona, Locarno, Lugano, and other regions south of the Alps; and they continued to lease Swiss legions—with their consent—to foreign powers. But after the defeat of the Swiss pikemen at Marignano (1515) the Confederation renounced territorial expansion, adopted a policy of neutrality, and directed its virile peasantry, its skillful artisans, and its resourceful merchants in developing one of the most civilized civilizations in history.

The Church was as genial and corrupt in Switzerland as in Italy. She gave patronage and considerable freedom to the humanists who gathered around Froben and Erasmus at Basel. It was part of the moral tolerance of the age that most Swiss priests enjoyed the services of concubines.¹ One Swiss bishop charged his clergy four guilders for every child born to them, and in one year garnered 1522 guilders from this source.² He complained that many priests gambled, frequented taverns, and got drunk³—apparently without paying an episcopal fee. Several cantons—Zurich in particular—set up civic supervision of churchmen and taxed monastic properties. The bishop of Constance claimed all Zurich as his feudal fief, and demanded of it obedience and tithes; but the papacy was too enmeshed in Italian politics to support his claims effectively. In 1510 Pope Julius II, in return for some Genevese legions, agreed that the town council of Geneva should regulate the monasteries, convents, and public morals within its domain.⁴ So, seven years before Luther’s theses, the essence of the Reformation was achieved in Zurich and Geneva—the supremacy of secular over ecclesiastical authority. The path was cleared for Zwingli and Calvin to establish their diverse mergers of Church and state.

II. ZWINGLI

A visit to the birthplace of Huldreich or Ulrich Zwingli suggests the not invariable rule that great men are born in small houses. The most rational and unsuccessful of the Reformers began life (January 1, 1484) in a tiny cottage in the mountain valley village of Wildhaus, fifty miles southeast of Zurich, in the present canton of Saint-Gall. A low gable roof, walls of heavy boards, little mullioned windows, floors of massive planks, low ceilings, dark rooms, creaking stairs, sturdy beds of oak, a table, a chair, a shelf for books: this historic home bespeaks an environment in which natural selection was rigorous, and supernatural selection seemed an indispensable hope. Ulrich’s father was chief magistrate in that hidden hamlet, and his mother was the proud sister of a priest. He was the third of eight sons, who competed for the admiration of two sisters. From his boyhood he was destined for the priesthood.

His uncle, dean of the church at near-by Wesen, shared with his parents in his education, and gave Zwingli a humanistic bent and breadth that sharply distinguished him from Luther and Calvin. At ten the boy was sent to a Latin school at Basel; at fourteen he entered at Bern a college headed by an outstanding native classicist; from sixteen to eighteen he studied in the University of Vienna in its humanist heyday under Conrad Celtes. He lightened his labors by playing on the lute, harp, violin, flute, and dulcimer. At eighteen he returned to Basel, and took theology under Thomas Wyttenbach, who, as early as 1508, attacked indulgences, clerical celibacy, and the Mass. At twenty-two (1506) Zwingli received his master’s degree, and was ordained priest. He celebrated his first Mass at Wildhaus amid joyful relatives, and, with a hundred guilders raised for him, bought appointment⁵ to a pastorate in Glarus, twenty miles away.

There, while zealously performing his duties, he continued his studies. He taught himself Greek to read the New Testament in the original. He read with enthusiasm Homer, Pindar, Democritus, Plutarch, Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Seneca, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and wrote a commentary on the skeptical humorist Lucian. He corresponded with Pico della Mirandola and Erasmus, called Erasmus “the greatest philosopher and theologian,” visited him reverently (1515), and read him every night as a prelude to sleep. Like Erasmus, he grew a sharp nose for ecclesiastical corruption, a genial scorn for doctrinal bigotry, and an ardent refusal to think of the classical philosophers and poets as burning in hell. He vowed that he “would rather share the eternal lot of a Socrates or a Seneca than that of a pope.” ⁶ He did not let his sacerdotal vows exclude him from the pleasures of the flesh; he had some affairs with generous women, and continued so to indulge himself until his marriage (1514). His congregation did not seem to mind, and the popes paid him, till 1520, an annual pension of fifty florins for supporting them against the pro-French party in Glarus. In 1513 and 1515 he accompanied the Glarus contingent of Swiss mercenaries to Italy as their chaplain, and did his best to keep them faithful to the papal cause; but his contact with war at the battles of Navarro and Marignano turned him strongly against any further sale of Swiss valor to foreign governments.

In 1516 the French faction in Glarus won the upper hand, and Zwingli moved to a pastorate at Einsiedeln in the canton of Schwyz. His preaching there took a Protestant tinge even before Luther’s rebellion. In 1517 he called for a religion based exclusively on the Bible, and he told his archbishop, Cardinal Matthäus Schinner, that there was scant warrant in Scripture for the papacy. In August 1518, he attacked abuses in the sale of indulgences, and persuaded Benedictine monks to remove, from their lucrative shrine of the Virgin, an inscription promising pilgrims “full remission of all sins in guilt and punishment alike.”⁷ Some pilgrims from Zurich brought to their pastors an enthusiastic report of his preaching. On December 10, 1518, he accepted a call to be vicar or “people’s priest” at the Grossmünster, or Great Minster, of Zurich, the most enterprising city in Switzerland.

He was now approaching maturity in morals and mind. He undertook a series of sermons expounding, from the Greek text, all the New Testament except the Apocalypse, which he disliked; he had little in him of the mysticism that shared in forming Luther. We have no portrait of him from life, but his contemporaries described him as a handsome, ruddy-faced, fullblooded man, with a melodious voice that captured his congregation. He did not rival Luther in eloquence or exegesis; yet his sermons were so convincing in sincerity and clarity that soon all Zurich responded to his influence. His ecclesiastical superiors supported him when he resumed his campaign against the sale of indulgences. Bernhardin Samson, a Franciscan friar from Milan, had crossed the Saint Gotthard Pass in August 1518, to become the Tetze] of Switzerland. He offered Pope Leo’s indulgence to the rich on parchment for a crown, to the poor on paper for a few pennies; and with a wave of his hand he absolved from the pains of purgatory all souls that had died in Bern. Zwingli protested; the bishop of Constance seconded him; and Leo X, learning something from events in Germany, recalled his lavish apostle.

In 1519 plague struck Zurich, taking a third of the population in half a year. Zwingli stayed at his post, toiled night and day in the care of the sick, caught the infection himself, and came close to death. When he recovered he was the most popular figure in Zurich. Distant dignitaries like Pirkheimer and Dürer sent him felicitations. In 1521 he was made head priest of the Grossmünster. He was now strong enough to proclaim openly the Reformation in Switzerland.

III. THE ZWINGLIAN REFORMATION

Almost unconsciously, but as a natural result of his unusual education, he had changed the character of the pastorate in his church. Before him the sermon had counted for little; Mass and communion had been nearly all the service; Zwingli made the sermon dominate the ritual. He became teacher as well as preacher; and as his confidence grew he drove home ever more forcefully his conviction that Christianity should be restored to its early simplicity of organization and worship. He was deeply stirred by Luther’s revolt and writings, and by Huss’s treatise On the Church. By 1520 he was publicly attacking monasticism, purgatory, and the invocation of saints; furthermore, he argued that the payment of tithes to the Church should be purely voluntary, as in Scripture. His bishop begged him to withdraw these statements; he persisted; and the cantonal council supported him by ordering all priests within its jurisdiction to preach only what they found in the Bible. In 1521 Zwingli persuaded the council to forbid the enlistment of Swiss soldiery by the French; a year later the prohibition was extended to all foreign powers; and when Cardinal Schinner continued to recruit Swiss troops for the pope, Zwingli pointed out to his congregation that the Cardinal wore a red hat not without reason, for “if it were wrung you would see the blood of your nearest kindred drip from its folds.”⁸ Finding no text in the Testament for the avoidance of meat in Lent, he allowed his parishioners to ignore the Church’s rules for Lenten fasts. The bishop of Constance protested; Zwingli answered him in a book, Archeteles (beginning and end), which predicted a universal rebellion against the Church, and advised the prelates to imitate Caesar, fold their garments about them, and die with grace and dignity. With ten other priests he petitioned the bishop to end clerical immorality by allowing sacerdotal marriage (1522). He was at this time keeping Anna Reinhard as his mistress or secret wife, In 1524 he publicly married her, a year before Luther’s marriage to Catherine von Bora.

This definite rupture with the Church was preceded by two disputations that recalled the Leipzig debate of Luther and Eck, and distantly echoed the Scholastic disputations of the medieval universities. As a semi-democratic republic, Switzerland was not shocked by Zwingli’s suggestion that the differences between his views and those of his conservative opponents should receive an open and impartial hearing. The Great Council of Zurich, blithely assuming theological jurisdiction, invited the bishops to send representatives. They came in force, and altogether some 600 persons gathered for the exciting contest in the city hall (January 25, 1523).

Zwingli offered to defend sixty-seven theses.

Johann Faber, Vicar-General of the diocese of Constance, refused to discuss these propositions in detail, claiming that they should be laid before great universities or a general council of the Church. Zwingli thought this unnecessary; now that the New Testament was available in the vernaculars, all could have the Word of God to decide these issues; that was enough. The Council agreed; it declared Zwingli guiltless of heresy, and bade all Zurich clergymen to preach only what they could establish by Scripture. Here, as in Lutheran Germany, the state took over the Church.

Most priests—their salaries being now guaranteed by the state—accepted the Council’s order. Many of them married, baptized in the vernacular, neglected the Mass, and abandoned the veneration of images. A band of enthusiasts began indiscriminately to destroy pictures and statues in the churches of Zurich. Disturbed by the spread of violence, Zwingli arranged a second disputation (October 26, 1523), which was attended by 550 laymen and 350 clergymen. The outcome was an order of the Council that a committee including Zwingli should prepare a booklet of doctrinal instruction for the people, and that meanwhile all violence should cease. Zwingli rapidly composed Eine kurze Christliche Einleitung, which was sent to all the clergy of the canton. The Catholic hierarchy protested, and the Diet of the Confederation, meeting at Lucerne (January 26, 1524), seconded the protest, at the same time pledging itself to ecclesiastical reform. The Council ignored the protests.

Zwingli formulated his doctrine more amply in two Latin treatises: De vera et falsa religione (1525) and Ratio fidei (1530). He accepted the basic theology of the Church—a triune God, the Fall of Adam and Eve, the Incarnation, Virgin Birth, and Atonement; but he interpreted “original sin” not as a taint of guilt inherited from our “first parents,” but as an unsocial tendency inherent in the nature of man.¹⁰ He agreed with Luther that man can never earn salvation by good works, but must believe in the redeeming efficacy of Christ’s sacrificial death. He agreed with Luther and Calvin on predestination: every event, and therefore every individual’s eternal fate, has been foreseen by God, and must occur as so foreseen. But God has fated for damnation only those who reject the Gospel offered them. All children (of Christian parents) who die in infancy are saved, even if unbaptized, for they were too young to sin. Hell is real, but purgatory is “a figment .... a lucrative business for its authors”; Scripture knows nothing of it.¹¹ The sacraments are not miraculous vehicles, but useful symbols, of divine grace. Auricular confession is unnecessary; no priest—only God—can forgive sin; but it is often beneficial to confide our spiritual troubles to a priest.¹² The Lord’s Supper is no actual eating of the body of Christ, but a symbol of the union of the soul with God, and of the individual with the Christian community.

Zwingli kept the Eucharist as part of the Reformed service, and administered it in both bread and wine, but he offered it only four times a year. In that occasional celebration much of the Mass was retained, but it was recited in Swiss German by congregation and priest. During the remainder of the year the Mass was replaced by the sermon; the appeal of ritual to the senses and the imagination was subordinated to the appeal of discourse to the mind—a rash gamble on popular intelligence and the stability of ideas. Since an infallible Bible had now to substitute for an infallible Church as a guide to doctrine and conduct, Luther’s German translation of the New Testament was adapted to the Swiss German dialect, and a corps of scholars and divines, led by the saintly Leo Jud, was commissioned to prepare a German version of the entire Bible. This was published by Christian Froschauer at Zurich in 1534, four years before Luther’s better version appeared.

In faithful obedience to the Second Commandment, and signalizing the return of Protestant Christianity to its early Jewish traditions, the Zurich Council ordered the removal of all religious images, relics, and ornaments from the churches of the city; even the organs were banished, and the immense interior of the Grossmünster was left dismally bare, as it is today. Some of the images were absurd enough, some lent themselves so readily to superstition as to merit destruction; but some were sufficiently beautiful to make Zwingli’s successor, Heinrich Bullinger, mourn their loss. Zwingli himself had a tolerant attitude toward images that were not worshiped as wonder-working idols,¹³ but he condoned the demolition as a reproof to idolatry.¹⁴ Village churches in the canton were allowed to keep their images if a majority of the congregation so desired. Catholics retained some civic rights, but were ineligible to public office. Attendance at Mass was punishable by a fine; eating fish instead of meat on Friday was forbidden by law.¹⁵ Monasteries and nunneries (with one exception) were closed or turned into hospitals or schools; monks and nuns emerged from the cloister into marriage. Saints’ days were abolished, and pilgrimages, holy water, and Masses for the dead disappeared. Though not all these changes were consummated by 1524, yet the Reformation was by that time far more advanced in Zwingli and Zurich than in Luther and Wittenberg; Luther then was still a celibate monk, and still said Mass.

In November 1524, Zurich formed a Privy Council (Heimliche Rath) of six members to prepare settlements of urgent or delicate problems of government. Between Zwingli and this Council a working compromise took form: he surrendered to it the regulation of ecclesiastical as well as secular affairs, and in both fields it followed his lead. Church and state in Zurich became one organization, of which Zwingli was unofficial head, and in which the Bible was accepted (like the Koran in Islam) as the first source and final test of law. In Zwingli, as later in Calvin, the Old Testament ideal of the prophet guiding the state was realized.

So quickly and completely successful in Zurich, Zwingli turned an acquisitive eye upon the Catholic cantons, and wondered whether all Switzerland might not be won to the new form of the old faith.

IV. ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

The Reformation had split the Confederation, and seemed destined to destroy it. Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen, Appenzell, and the Grisons favored Zurich; the other cantons were hostile. Five cantons—Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Zug—formed a Catholic League to suppress all Hussite, Lutheran, and Zwinglian movements (1524). Archduke Ferdinand of Austria urged all Catholic states to united action, promised his aid, and doubtless hoped to restore the Hapsburg power in Switzerland. On July 16 all the cantons except Schaffhausen and Appenzell agreed to exclude Zurich from future federal diets. Zurich and Zwingli responded by sending missionaries into the Thorgau district to proclaim the Reformation. One of these was arrested; friends rescued him, and led a wild crowd that sacked and burned a monastery, and destroyed images in several churches (July 1524). Three of the leaders were executed, and a martial spirit rose on both sides. Erasmus, timid in Basel, was alarmed to see pious worshipers, aroused by their preachers, come out of church “like men possessed, with anger and rage painted on their faces .... like warriors animated by their general to some mighty attack.” ¹⁶ Six cantons threatened to leave the Confederation if Zurich were not chastised.

Zwingli, enjoying his new role of war leader, advised Zurich to increase its army and arsenal, to seek alliance with France, to build a fire behind Ferdinand by fomenting revolution in Tirol, and to promise Thorgau and Saint-Gall the properties of their monasteries in return for their support. To the Catholic League he offered peace on three conditions: that it yield to Zurich the famous abbey of St. Gall; that it renounce the Austrian alliance; and that it surrender to Zurich the Lucerne satirist Thomas Murner, who had written too pungently of the Reformers. The League scorned these terms. Zurich ordered its representatives in Saint-Gall to seize the abbey; they obeyed (January 28, 1529). In February the tension was raised by events in Basel.

The Protestant leader in that “Athens of Switzerland” was Johannes Hausschein, who had Hellenized his name, meaning house lamp, into Oecolampadius. He wrote Latin poetry at twelve, mastered Greek soon afterward, and rose to rank second only to Reuchlin as a Hebraist. In his pulpit at St. Martin’s Church and in his chair of theology at the university, he made a name for himself as a reformer and moralist, humane in everything but religion. By 1521 he was attacking the abuses of the confessional, the doctrine of transubstantiation, the idolatry of the Virgin. In 1523 Luther acclaimed him. In 1525 he adopted the Zwinglian program, including the prosecution of Anabaptists. But he rejected predestination; salus nostra ex Deo, he taught, perditio nostra ex nobis—” Our salvation comes from God, our damnation from ourselves.”¹⁷ When the Basel Council, now predominantly Protestant, proclaimed freedom of worship (1528), Oecolampadius protested, and demanded the suppression of the Mass.

On February 8,1529,800 men, assembled in the church of the Franciscans, sent to the Council a demand that the Mass should be forbidden, that all Catholics should be dismissed from office, and that a more democratic constitution should be put in force. The Council deliberated. On the following day the petitioners came in arms to the market place. When by noon the Council had still reached no decision, the crowd moved into the churches with hammers and axes, and destroyed all discoverable religious images.¹⁸ Erasmus described the affair in a letter to Pirkheimer:

The Council took the hint, and voted full abolition of the Mass. Erasmus, Beatus Rhenanus, and nearly all professors in the university left Basel. Oecolampadius, triumphant, survived the outbreak by only two years, dying soon after Zwingli’s death.

In May 1529, a Protestant missionary from Zurich, attempting to preach in the city of Schwyz, was burned at the stake. Zwingli persuaded the Zurich Council to declare war. He drew up the plan of campaign, and led the canton’s troops in person. At Kappel, ten miles south of Zurich, they were stopped by one man, Landemann Aebli of Glarus, who begged an hour’s truce while he negotiated with the League. Zwingli suspected treachery, and favored immediate advance; he was overruled by his Bernese allies, and by his soldiers, who readily fraternized, across the cantonal and theological border, with the soldiers of the enemy. For sixteen days negotiations continued; finally the good sense of the Swiss prevailed, and the First Peace of Kappel was signed (June 24,1529). The terms were a victory for Zwingli: the Catholic cantons agreed to pay an indemnity to Zurich, and to end their alliance with Austria; neither party was to attack the other because of religious differences; and in the “common lands” subject to two ox more cantons the people were to decide, by a majority vote, the regulation of their religious life. Zwingli, however, was dissatisfied: he had demanded, and not received, freedom for Protestant preaching in Catholic cantons. He predicted an early rupture of the peace.

It lasted twenty-eight months. In the interim an effort was made to unite the Protestants of Switzerland and Germany. Charles V had patched up his quarrel with Clement VII; both were now free to join forces against the Protestants. But these were already a powerful political force. Half of Germany was Lutheran; many German cities—Ulm, Augsburg, Württemberg, Mainz, Frankfurt-am-Main, Strasbourg—had strong Zwinglian sympathies; and in Switzerland, though the rural districts were Catholic, most of the towns were Protestant. Obviously self-protection against the Empire and the papacy required Protestant unity. Only theology stood in the way.

Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, took the initiative by inviting Luther, Melanchthon, and other German Protestants to meet Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and other Swiss Protestants in his castle at Marburg, north of Frankfurt. On September 29, 1529, the rival factions met. Zwingli made generous concessions; he dispelled Luther’s suspicion that he doubted the divinity of Christ; he accepted the Nicene Creed, and the dogma of original sin. But he would not withdraw his view of the Eucharist as a symbol and commemoration rather than a miracle. Luther chalked on the conference table the words ascribed to Christ—“This is my body”—and would admit none but a literal interpretation. On fourteen articles the parties signed an agreement; on the Eucharist they parted (October 3), and not amicably. Luther refused Zwingli’s proffered hand, saying, “Your spirit is not our spirit”; he drew up a theological profession in seventeen articles, including “consubstantiation,” and persuaded the Lutheran princes to reject alliance with any group that would not sign all seventeen.²⁰ Melanchthon agreed with his master. “We told the Zwinglians,” he wrote, “that we wondered how their consciences would allow them to call us brethren when they held that our doctrine was erroneous”;²¹ here in one sentence is the spirit of the age. In 1532 Luther admonished Duke Albrecht of Prussia not to allow any Zwinglian in his territory, on pain of everlasting damnation. It was too much to ask of Luther that he should pass at one step from the Middle Ages into modernity; he had received too profound an impress of medieval religion to bear patiently with any repudiation of its fundamentals; he felt, like a good Catholic, that his world of thought would collapse, the whole meaning of life would fade away, if he lost any basic element of the faith in which he had been formed. Luther was the most medieval of modern men.

Crushed with this failure, Zwingli returned to a Zurich that was becoming restless under his dictatorship. Strict sumptuary laws were resented; trade was hampered by the religious differences among the cantons; artisans were dissatisfied with their still small voice in the government; and Zwingli’s sermons, cluttered with politics, had lost their inspiration and charm. He felt the change so keenly that he asked the Council’s leave to seek a pastorate elsewhere. He was prevailed upon to stay.

He gave much of his time now to writing. In 1530 he sent his Ratio fidei to Charles V, who gave no sign of receiving it. In 1531 he addressed to Francis I a Christianae fidei brevis et clara expositio. In this “brief and clear exposition of the Christian faith” he expressed his Erasmian conviction that a Christian, on reaching paradise, would find there many noble Jews and pagans: not only Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Isaiah .... but Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Numa, Camillus, the Catos, the Scipios; “in short, there has not been any good man, nor any holy mind, nor any faithful soul, from the very beginning of the world even to its end, whom you will not see there with God. What could be imagined more joyful, pleasing, and noble, than this sight?”²² This passage so shocked Luther that he concluded that Zwingli must have been a “heathen”;²³ and Bishop Bossuet, agreeing for once with Luther, quoted it to prove that Zwingli had been a hopeless infidel.²⁴

On May 15, 1531, an assembly of Zurich and her allies voted to compel the Catholic cantons to allow freedom of preaching in their territory. When the cantons refused, Zwingli proposed war, but his allies preferred an economic blockade. The Catholic cantons, denied all imports, declared war. Again rival armies marched; again Zwingli led the way and carried the standard; again the armies met at Kappel (October 11, 1531)—the Catholics with 8,000 men, the Protestants with 1,500. This time they fought. The Catholics won, and Zwingli, aged forty-seven, was among the 500 Zurichers slain. His body was quartered and then burned on a pyre of dung.²⁵ Luther, hearing of Zwingli’s death, pronounced it the judgment of heaven on a heathen,²⁶ and “a triumph for us.”²⁷ “I wish from my heart,” he is reported to have said, “that Zwingli could be saved, but I fear for the contrary, for Christ has said that those who deny Him shall be damned.” ²⁸

Zwingli was succeeded in Zurich by Heinrich Bullinger, and at Basel Oswald Myconius carried on after Oecolampadius’ death. Bullinger avoided politics, superintended the city’s schools, sheltered fugitive Protestants, and dispensed charity to the needy of any creed. He approved the execution of Servetus, but, barring that, he approached a theory of general religious freedom. He joined with Myconius and Leo Jud in formulating the First Helvetic Confession (1536), which for a generation was the authoritative expression of Zwinglian views; and with Calvin he drew up the Consensus Tigurinus (1549), which brought the Zurich and Genevan Protestants into one “Reformed Church.”

Despite that protective accord, Catholicism regained in later years much of its lost ground in Switzerland, partly through its victory at Kappel; theologies are proved or disproved in history by competitive slaughter or fertility. Seven cantons adhered to Catholicism—Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Zug, Unterwalden, Fribourg, and Solothurn; four were definitely Protestant-Zurich, Basel, Bern, and Schaffhausen; the rest remained poised between the two faiths, uncertain of their certainties. Zwingli’s successor at Glarus, Valentin Tschudi, compromised by saying Mass in the morning for Catholics, and preaching an evangelical—purely Scriptural—sermon in the evening for the Protestants; he argued for mutual toleration, and was tolerated; he wrote a Chronicle so impartial that no one could tell from it which faith he favored. Even in that age there were Christians.