The constitution, with the exception of a few minor features, remained a dead letter. Luther learned a bitter lesson from the Peasants' War and from the visitation of the churches in Saxony. Lambert himself, in his letters, complained of the prevailing corruptions and the abuse of evangelical liberty. A good reason both for the necessity and difficulty of discipline, which should have begun with the prince. But self-government must be acquired by actual trial and experience.
Nobody can learn to swim without going into the water.
The Landgrave put himself at the head of the church, and reformed it after the Saxon model. The combination of Lutheran and Reformed elements in the Hessian reformation explains the confessional complication and confusion in the subsequent history, and the present status of the Protestant Church in Hesse, which is claimed by both denominations. It became the second nursery of the Protestant ministry, next to Wittenberg, and remains to this day an important institution. Francis Lambert, Adam Kraft, Erhard Schnepf, and Hermann Busch were its first theological professors. Lambert now had, after a roaming life of great poverty, a settled situation with a decent support.