PROTESTANT, the generic name for an adherent of those Churches which base their teaching on the principles of the Reformation. The name is derived from the formal Protestatio handed in by the evangelical states of the empire, including some of the more important princes and imperial cities, against the recess of the diet of Spires (1529), which decreed that the religious status quo was to be preserved, that no innovations were to be introduced in those states which had not hitherto made them, and that the mass was everywhere to be tolerated. The name Protes tant seems to have been first applied to the protesting princes by their opponents, and it soon came to be used indiscriminately of all the adherents of the reformed religion. Its use appears to have spread more rapidly outside Germany than in Germany itself, one cause of its popularity being that it was negative and colourless, and could thus be applied by adherents of the "old religion" to those of the "new religion," without giving offence, on occasions when it was expedient to avoid abusive language.
As the designation of a Church, "Protestant" was unknown dur ing the Reformation period and for a long while after. In Ger
many the Reformers called themselves usually evangelici, and avoided special designations for their communities, which they conceived only as part of the true Catholic Church. It was not until the period of the Thirty Years' War that the two main schools of the reformed or evangelical Churches marked their definitive separation : the Calvinists describing themselves as the "Reformed Church," the Lutherans as the "Lutheran Church." In France, in England, in Holland the evangelicals continued to de scribe their churches as ecclesiae reformatae, without the arriere pensee which in Germany had confined the designation "Re formed" to the followers of a particular church order and doctrine. As to the word "Protestant," it was never applied to the Church of England or to any other, save unofficially and in the wide sense above indicated, until the style "Protestant Episcopal Church" was assumed by the Anglican communion in the United States.