I will not dwell on the sixteen remaining years of the Thirty Years’ War.  It is too horrible a picture to paint.  The desolation and misery which overwhelmed Germany were most frightful and revolting.  The war was carried on without system or genius.  “Expeditions were undertaken apparently with no other view than to desolate hostile provinces, till in the end provisions and winter quarters formed the principal object of the summer campaigns.”  “Disease, famine, and want of discipline swept away whole armies before they had seen an enemy.”  Soldiers deserted the ranks, and became roving banditti.  Law and justice entirely vanished from the land.  Germany, it is asserted by Mitchell, lost probably twelve millions of people.  Before the war, the population was sixteen millions; at the close of the war, it had dwindled to four millions.  The city of Augsburg at one time had eighty thousand inhabitants; at the close of the war, it had only eighteen thousand.  “No less than thirty thousand villages and hamlets were destroyed.  Peaceful peasants were hunted for mere sport, like the beasts of the forest.  Citizens were nailed up and fired at like targets.  Women were collected into bands, driven like slaves into camp, and exposed to indignities worse than death.  The fields were allowed to run waste, and forests sprung up and covered entire districts which before the war had been under full cultivation.”  Amid these scenes of misery and ruin, vices were more marked than calamities.  They were carried to the utmost pitch of vulgarity.  Both Austrian and Swedish generals were often so much intoxicated, for days together, as to be incapable of service.  Never was a war attended by so many horrors.  Never was crime more general and disgusting.  So terrible were the desolations, that it took Germany one hundred years to recover from her losses.  It never recovered the morality and religion which existed in the time of Luther.  That war retarded civilization in all the countries where it raged.  It was a moral and physical conflagration.

But there is a God in this world, and the evils were overruled.  It is certain that Protestantism was rescued from extermination on the continent of Europe.  It is clear also that a barrier was erected against the aggressions of Austria.  The Catholic and the Protestant religions were left unmolested in the countries where they prevailed, and all religious sects were tolerated.  Religious toleration, since the Thirty Years’ War, has been the boast and glory of Germany.

We should feel a sickening melancholy if something for the ultimate good of the world were not to come from such disasters as filled Germany with grief and indignation for a whole generation; for the immediate effects of the Thirty Years’ War were more disastrous than those of any war I have read of in the history of Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.  In the civil wars of France and England, cities and villages were generally spared.  Civilization