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



of tenets which might almost be said to constitute a distinct religion. 

 AVhen tremendous catastrophes, which hardly needed to he heralded 

 by signs from heaven, the burning of towns and the destruction of 

 villages, the slaughter of many thousands on the field of battle, the 

 massacre of innumerable women and children, the uprooting and 

 scattering of whole bodies of population, were witnessed as it were 

 from the house-tops in most parts of the land, and in many districts 

 of it seemed almost to form the regular order of things — the still, 

 small voice of which I have spoken, could of course only be heard 

 with difficulty and at intervals. Yet that it did make itself heard 

 we know from several instances. A notable one is that of the Jesuit 

 poet. Count Frederick Spee, a personality of the Great War which 

 still lacks, so far as I know, its due biographical monument. Trained 

 at Cologne on the lines of orthodoxy, he was serving as priest and 

 preacher in the Minster at Paderborn, when the Bishop of Wiirzburg 

 requested the Order to which Spee belonged to provide him with a 

 confessor for a number of witches who had been condemned to be 

 burnt to death in his episcopal capital. That such a functionary 

 was needed may appear from the trustworthy statement that, in the 

 year of this summons and the following year, 158 persons were 

 publicly burnt to death at AYiirzburg on the charge of witchcraft — 

 including three canons of the cathedral, seventy town councillors, 

 a doctor of theology, several young noblemen, a blind girl, and two 

 quite young children.* Spee did his duty until the authorities 

 decided that no Jesuits should any longer be allowed to hear such 

 confessions, which interfered with the due administration of justice. 

 His hair had grown white over his work, and when his missionary 

 activity (this time directed against heresy) led to an attempt against 

 his life, he was allowed to retire for a time into the sylvan solitude 

 of a village near Corvey. There it was that he wrote or put together 

 the series of religious hymns or songs which first appeared in a col- 

 lected form in the last year of the War ; some thirteen years after 

 the death of the author, in the midst of his ministrations at Trier 

 to a population afflicted both by a pestilence and by the ravages of 

 war. The Trutznachtigall — I do not like to translate the Trusty 

 Nightingale, but it gives the sort of sense — with its simple strains, 

 full of deep rehgious emotion, intended partly for singing in church 

 but not as regular contributions to the liturgy, cheered many a 

 pious heart in these times of stress and sorrow, and conquered for 

 itself a corner in the national literature. 



While it would be difficult to find a more lurid background for the 

 study of a pious life, vocal with religious emotion, an equally true, 

 though more tranquil picture might be drawn of the life of a devoted 



* There is something specially pitiful in the case of these young ' witches.' 

 Elsewhere we read of that pattern of orthodoxy, Elector Max, of Bavaria, being 

 in his youth taken by his tutor to assist at the burning of a young female witch. 



