1912] on the Effects of the Thirtij Yean War. ;V.»5 



with certain limitations as to foundations that were to be left un- 

 touched as from a certain date, was pronounced to be the determining 

 authority. But the religious life which underlay, or lay beyond, 

 divergent confessions of faith or articles of belief could not be estab- 

 lished or disestablished, settled or unmoored, by treaties and pacifica- 

 tions, and this life the AVar had constantly spoiled, broken and out- 

 raged. Except, in a measure, in the Bohemian or earliest stage of 

 the "War, and perhaps in the first siege of Madgeburg, and on some 

 similar occasions in Silesia, the Palatinate and elsewhere, tiie War 

 had even in its earliest stages not presented itself to the populations 

 in the light of a religious war so much as in that of an endless series 

 of invasions, occupations, devastations, bringing with it all the blank- 

 ness as well as all the horrors belonging to a struggle carried on for 

 ends to which those who suffered from it were more or less indiifereni, 

 or, worst of all, in that of a war carrieil on for its own sake. Thus 

 religion, with all the emotions that nourish the religious sense, had 

 been largely thrust out of tlie issues of the conflict, and by some of 

 its agents frankly ignored. Meanwhile, those principles which are 

 the foundations of the social edifice — respect for purity, sobriety, 

 chastity, for the very sanctity of life itself — had become the playthings 

 of homeless hordes of soldiery ; and men (and with them doubtless 

 women and children) had unlearnt the laws which should govern the 

 relations and the conduct of human beings towards God and their 

 neighbours. In their place stalked abroad all the vices of a society 

 unhinged from its ordinary conditions — rank dishonesty in all the 

 dealings of the day, and a shameless disregard of other demands than 

 those of a self-indulgence eager to pluck the fruit of the day before 

 the hour of doom. 



Yet the voice of religion made heard its whisper — here and there 

 its clear admonition — after the storms, and in the intervals allowed 

 by darkness and riot ; and out of the spiritual anarchy were born 

 not mere passing murmurings or protests, but what were to prove 

 the beginnings of new and far-reaching spiritual movements in the 

 land. It should be remembered that in yet some other ways, not 

 hitherto adverted to in this brief paper, the age of the Thirty Years' 

 "War is that in which the spiritual and intellectual life of Germany 

 reached its lowest depths. The superstitious notions and misbelief 

 which the Protestant Reformation had not only been unsuccessful in 

 overcoming, but which it had allowed to continue their advance — at 

 times almost under its protection — the belief in magic and witchcraft, 

 and in the grotesque extravagances of astrology and alchemy — had 

 corrupted all classes, from the highest to the lowest ; had invaded 

 the province of science— the strength of the demons, says one theo- 

 logical thinker, is as undeniable as the force of the winds, and 

 Kepler taught that each of the heavenly bodies possessed a soul of 

 its own ; had permeated the art and the practice of medicine ; and, 

 in the case of the peasantry, had congealed themselves into a mass 



