In this connection the secularization of ecclesiastical fiefs was strongly insisted on.
As men found, however, that neither the Emperor Sigismund, nor the Emperor Friedrich III, nor the Emperor Maximilian, upon each of whom successively their hopes had been cast as the possible realization of the German Messiah of earlier dreams, fulfilled their expectations, nay, as each in succession implicitly belied these hopes, showing no disposition whatever to act up to the views promulgated in their names, the tradition of the Imperial deliverer gradually lost its force and popularity.

By the opening of the Lutheran Reformation the opinion had become general that a change would not come from above, but that the initiative must rest with the people themselves--with the classes specially oppressed by existing conditions, political, economic, and ecclesiastical--to effect by their own exertions such a transformation as was shadowed forth in the spurious constitutions.
These, and similar ideas, were now everywhere taken up and elaborated, often in a still more radical sense than the original; and they everywhere found hearers and adherents.
The "true inwardness" of the change, of which the Protestant Reformation represented the ideological side, meant the transformation of society from a basis mainly corporative and co-operative to one individualistic in its essential character.

The whole polity of the Middle Ages industrial, social, political, ecclesiastical, was based on the principle of the group or the community--ranging in hierarchical order from the trade-guild to the town corporation; from the town corporation through the feudal orders to the Imperial throne itself; from the single monastery to the order as a whole; and from the order as a whole to the complete hierarchy of the Church as represented by the papal chair.

The principle of this social organization was now breaking down.

The modern and bourgeois conception of the autonomy of the individual in all spheres of life was beginning to affirm itself.
The most definite expression of this new principle asserted itself in the religious sphere.