The laborers sank back into a more wretched state than before; oppression stalked with less rebuke than ever through the land.
SECTION 3.

THE FORMATION or THE PROTESTANT PARTY [Sidenote: Defections from Luther] 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.