The bishops, who fully understood the importance of the moment, remained deaf to all appeals. United with the laymen who had continued faithful to them, they would be able to carry the vote. Their clamor increased. The friends of the Reformation, therefore, judged it expedient to grant part of their demands in order to save the vote. They allowed them to draw up the compact. This seems an enormous concession, but constitutional forms were not as yet very fully developed; and the Diet reserved to itself the power either of amending the document or even of rejecting it, if it did not suit it. The bishops made large use of the power accorded to them. They stipulated, amongst other things, that they should fulfil their functions without having to give account to any but God alone; that every priest who should resist them should be prosecuted; that the tithes should be restored to ecclesiastics, and that whosoever refused to pay them should be summoned before the courts; that the cathedrals, convents, churches, and hospitals should be given up to the Roman clergy; and that in the next Diet a decision should be formed respecting the restitution of such of these houses as had been taken away from them. Nothing was stipulated about the rights of the evangelical Church. This might be deprived of every thing, and indeed they were already taking much from it.
The bishops brought this fatal project before the Diet and required the members to set their seals to it. The evangelicals heard it with astonishment, and the faithful Magnus Gjoë with the deepest emotion. He spoke thus: ‘The bishops have inserted in this compact some provisions which are in their favor and contrary to the decisions of the Reichstag; and they have suppressed others which were favorable to the evangelicals.’ Indignant at this fraud, the energetic Gjoë declared that he would not set his seal to the instrument. Eric Baner did the same. But the other Protestant members signed it, some of them from excessive prudence which degenerated into weakness, others under the impression that by granting to the Catholics what the latter regarded as necessary to their Church, they were only pursuing the plan of freedom and balance between the two confessions which the late king had designed. The instrument, which was immediately published, had the force of law in the kingdom.[336]