394 Mr. A. W. Ward [March 8, 



resisted him in combination with other powers, whose alliance they 

 had formally been justified in seeking. Historians have found again 

 in the decentralization, which already before the close of the War, 

 writers — such as Hippolithus a Lapide — had proclaimed a legitimate 

 political development, and the great publicists of the next generation, 

 notably Pufendorf , saw in the formation of states with strong absolute 

 governments the true creative process of the new era. The new era 

 came, but it came slowly, and bore the promise of new conflicts in its 

 bosom. Strong territorial or state organization, the reconstruction of 

 the service of each state in its army, in the body of its civil officials, 

 in the functions and responsibilities of its sovereign himself — was the 

 work awaiting the new generation, on whose behalf we may say that 

 the Great War had swept the path clear. 



One word more before I hurry to a close. Though the age was 

 not a creative one, in any direction of intellectual effort which in 

 Germany succeeded that of the Thirty Years' War — how could it be 

 such after the blight which had fallen on the land ? — its literary and 

 scientific impulses had not been wholly destroyed. Learned poets 

 and simple — Martin Opitz the reformer of the poetic art, Andreas 

 Gryphius the imitator of Shakespeare, Simon Dach who said that he 

 did not like writing poetry in German, but who produced in it two of 

 the most delightful lyrics (each in its way) in the language, besides 

 the religious poet of whom I will speak in closing — were all at work 

 during the course of the War itself. The Fruchtbringende Gesell- 

 schaft, founded in 1617 for the preservation, among other things, of 

 the purity of German speech, held up its head during the whole course 

 of the War, and continuously grew in numbers, though confining 

 itself to the noble and learned classes. The accumulation of know- 

 ledge progressed steadily, and the desire to methodize and systema- 

 tize it, as we should say, scientifically asserted itself more and more ; 

 the study of law made a fresh advance under such teachers as Con- 

 ring, another Helenstadt name representative of the many-sided, and 

 in his case almost encyclopaedic learning of the age — German's worst 

 age, as one of his biographers calls it ; history which had been silenced 

 in part or altogether in some of the Universities during the War re- 

 asserted her claim to instruct the present by the experiences of the 

 past — and before another generation had come and gone, the poly- 

 history of its predecessor had been exchanged for that aspiration 

 towards an advance in all the fields of human knowledge which finds 

 its incarnation in Leibniz. 



If this was much to have been saved, there is yet something more 

 to add. The religious life of Germany could not but suffer from the 

 War more than any other side of the national existence. The gain 

 secured by the Peace which concluded it to the cause of religious 

 liberty was, as has been seen, marred by uncertainties and exceptions ; 

 while as to the establishment of the several forms of faith it was the 

 fiat of the territorial prince, not the choice of his subjects, which, 



