It was at Augsburg in July, 1518, that the diet ventured thus boldly to speak.  This was one year after Luther had nailed upon the church door in Wittemberg, his ninety-five propositions, which had roused all Germany to scrutinize the abominable corruptions of the papal church.  This bold language of the diet, influenced by the still bolder language of the intrepid monk, alarmed Leo X., and on the 7th of August he issued his summons commanding Luther to repair to Rome to answer for heresy.  Maximilian, who had been foiled in his own attempt to attain the chair of St. Peter, who had seen so much of the infamous career of Julius and Alexander, as to lose all his reverence for the sacred character of the popes, and who regarded Leo X. merely as a successful rival who had thwarted his own plans, espoused, with cautious development, but with true interest, the cause of the reformer.  And now came the great war of the Reformation, agitating Germany in every quarter, and rousing the lethargic intellect of the nations as nothing else could rouse it.  Maximilian, with characteristic fickleness, or rather, with characteristic pliancy before every breeze of self-interest, was now on the one side, now on the other, and now, nobody knew where, until his career was terminated by sudden and fatal sickness.

The emperor was at Innspruck, all overwhelmed with his cares and his plans of ambition, when he was seized with a slight fever.  Hoping to be benefited by a change of air, he set out to travel by slow stages to one of his castles among the mountains of Upper Austria.  The disease, however, rapidly increased, and it was soon evident that death was approaching.  The peculiarities of his character were never more strikingly developed than in these last solemn hours.  Being told by his physicians that he had not long to live and that he must now prepare for the final judgment, he calmly replied, “I have long ago made that preparation.  Had I not done so, it would be too late now.”

For four years he had been conscious of declining health, and had always carried with him, wherever he traveled, an oaken coffin, with his shroud and other requisites for his funeral.  With very minute directions he settled all his worldly affairs, and gave the most particular instructions respecting his funeral.  Changing his linen, he strictly enjoined that his shirt should not be removed after his death, for his fastidious modesty was shocked by the idea of the exposure of his body, even after the soul had taken its flight.

He ordered his hair, after his death, to be cut off, all his teeth to be extracted, pounded to powder and publicly burned in the chapel of his palace.  For one day his remains were to be exposed to the public, as a lesson of mortality.  They were then to be placed in a sack filled with quicklime.  The sack was to be enveloped in folds of silk and satin, and then placed in the oaken coffin which had been so long awaiting his remains.  The coffin was then to be deposited under the altar of the chapel of his palace at Neustadt, in such a position that the officiating priest should ever trample over his head and heart.  The king expressed the hope that this humiliation of his body would, in some degree, be accepted by the Deity in atonement for the sins of his soul.  How universal the instinct that sin needs an atonement!