Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/52

 without violence to the constitution of the human mind. Of course the work went on: Protestant princes allowed and encouraged it, and Church property passed over with the people. When, therefore, the Jesuits had inaugurated the reaction, there was a vast amount of work for the Catholic powers to do, and there were plausible grounds in the terms of the religious peace for entering upon it. Ferdinand II., as executive of the Empire, returned over the interval and attempted to bring the movement back to the point where the Diet of Passau, about seventy years before, had agreed to have it stop, and this he did, doubtless, as a kind of legal preliminary step to the full restoration of the Empire and the world to the bosom of the Catholic Church.

With these suggestions, explanatory of the intricacies of the politics of the German Empire of those times, the reader is invited to review the history of this great struggle, perhaps the last formal one to reduce all personality in Christendom to the standard of an order—perhaps it were better to say, to annihilate all personality. It would almost seem, indeed, as if Providence had allowed this conflict between freedom of religious thought and thought in general on the one hand, and the subjection of all thinking on the other, to a process like that wrought by the implements of the artificer, to come on at a time when the artificial system was under the lead of the most perfect organization ever formed, and the party of free thought was in disintegration, in order that it might appear in which of the two systems humanity’s strength, and destiny, and the divine order of development, lay.

One of the greatest obstacles to progress in historical study, indeed an objection in many minds to reading his-