in those countries has scarcely ever been retarded for more than a generation; but it was put back in Germany for a century.  Yet the enormous sacrifice of life and property would seem to show the high value which Providence places on the great rights of mankind, in comparison with material prosperity or the lives of men.  What is spiritual is permanent; what is material is transient.  The early history of Christianity is the history of martyrdom.  Five millions of Crusaders perished, that Europe might learn liberality of mind.  It took one hundred years of contention and two revolutions to secure religious toleration in England.  France passed through awful political hurricanes, in order that feudal injustice might be removed.  In like manner, twelve millions of people perished in Germany, that despotism might be rebuked.

Fain would we believe that what little was gained proved a savor of life unto life; that seeds of progress were planted in that unhappy country which after a lapse of one hundred years would germinate and develop a higher civilization.  What a great Protestant power has arisen in northern Germany to awe and keep in check not Catholicism merely, but such a hyperborean giant as Russia in its daring encroachments.  But for Prussia, Russia might have extended her conquests to the south as well as to the west.  But for the Thirty Years’ War, no such empire as Prussia would have been probable, or perhaps possible.  But for that dreadful contest, there might have been to-day only the Catholic religion among the descendants of the Teutonic barbarians on the continent of Europe.  But for that war, the Austrian Empire might have retained a political ascendency in Europe until the French Revolution; and such countries as Sweden and Denmark might have been absorbed in it, as well as Saxony, Brandenburg, and Hanover.  What a terrible thing for Germany would have been the unbroken and iron despotism of Austria, extending its Briarean arms into every corner of Europe where the German language is spoken!  What a blow such a despotism would have been to science, literature, and philosophy!  Would Catholic Austria, supreme in Germany, have established schools, or rewarded literary men?  The Jesuits would have flourished and triumphed from Pomerania to Wallachia; from the Baltic to the Danube.

It may have taken one hundred years for Germany to rally after such miseries and disasters as I have had time only to allude to, and not fully to describe; but see how gloriously that country has at last arisen above all misfortunes!  Why may we not predict a noble future for so brave and honest a people,—­the true descendants of those Teutonic conquerers to whom God gave, nearly two thousand years ago, the possessions and the lands of the ancient races who had not what the Germans had,—­a soul; the soul which hopes, and the soul which conquers?  The Thirty Years’ War proved that liberty is not a dream, nor truth a defeated power.  Liberty cannot be