Then followed a persecution which has had no parallel since the slaughter of the Albigenses and the massacre of St. Bartholomew.  The unhappy kingdom of Bohemia was abandoned to inquisitions and executions; all liberties were suppressed, the nobles were decimated, ministers and teachers were burned or beheaded, and Protestants of every rank, age, and condition were prohibited from acting as guardians to children, or making wills, or contracting marriages with Catholics, or holding any office of trust and emolument.  They were outlawed as felons, and disfranchised as infidels.  The halls of justice were deserted, the Muses accompanied the learned in their melancholy flight, and all that remained of Bohemian gallantry and heroism forsook the land.  Strange to say, the land of Huss and Jerome became henceforth the strongest hold of Austrian despotism and papal superstition.

This is one of those instances where persecution proved successful.  It is a hackneyed saying that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church;” and it is true that lofty virtues have been generally developed by self-sacrifice and martyrdom, and that only through great tribulation have permanent blessings been secured.  The Hollanders, by inundating their fields and fighting literally to the “last ditch,” preserved their liberties and secured ultimate prosperity.  The fires of Smithfield did not destroy the reformed religion in England in the time of Mary, and the jails and judicial murders of later and better times did not prevent the progress of popular rights, or the extension of Puritanism in the wilds of the American continent.  But in the history of society the instances are unfortunately numerous when bigotry and despotism have kindled their infernal fires and erected their bloody scaffolds, not to purify the Church and nourish the principles of Christian progress, but to destroy what is good as well as what is evil.  What availed the struggles of the Waldenses in the Middle Ages?  Who came to the rescue of Savonarola when he attempted to reform the lives of degenerate Florentines?  What beneficial effects resulted ultimately from the Inquisition in Spain?  How was the revocation of the edict of Nantes overruled for the good of the Huguenots of France?

And yet the unfortunate suppression of religious liberty in Bohemia, and the sufferings of those who came to her rescue, especially the misfortunes of the Elector Palatine, arrayed the Protestant princes of Germany against the Emperor, and created general indignation throughout Europe.  Austria became more than ever a hated and dreaded power, not merely to the States of Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and England, but to Catholic France herself, then ruled by that able and ambitious statesman Cardinal Richelieu, before whose tomb in an after age the czar Peter bowed in earnest homage from the recollection and admiration of his transcendent labors in behalf of absolutism.  Even Richelieu, a prince of the Church and the persecutor of the Huguenots, was alarmed at the encroachments of Austria, and intrigued with Protestant princes to undermine her dangerous ascendency.