It was the tiny spark that set Europe on fire.  Out of it grew the Thirty Years’ War, the most terrible that ever scourged the civilized world.  When Catholic League and Evangelical Union first mustered their armies, Bohemia had a prosperous population of four million souls; when the war was over there were less than eight hundred thousand alive in that unhappy land, and the wolves that roamed its forests were scarcely more ferocious than the human starvelings who skulked among the smoking ruins of burned towns and hamlets.  Other states fared little better.  Two centuries did not wipe out the blight of those awful years when rapine and murder, inspired by bigotry and hate, ran riot in the name of religion.

In the gloom and horror of it all a noble figure stands forth alone.  It were almost worth the sufferings of a Thirty Years’ War for the world to have gained a Gustav Adolf.  The “snow-king” the Emperor’s generals named him when he first appeared on German soil at the head of his army of Northmen, and they prophesied that he would speedily melt, once the southern sun shone upon his host.  They little knew the man.  He went from victory to victory, less because he was the greatest general of his day than because he, and all his army with him, believed himself charged by the Almighty with the defence of his country and of his faith.  The Emperor had attacked both, the first by attempting to extend his dominion to the Baltic; but Pommerania and the Baltic provinces were regarded by the Swedish ruler as the outworks of his kingdom; and Sweden was Protestant.  Hence he drew the sword.  “Our brethren in the faith are sighing for deliverance from spiritual and bodily thraldom,” he said to his people.  “Please God, they shall not sigh long.”  That was his warrant.  Axel Oxenstjerna, his friend and right hand who lived to finish his work, said of him, “He felt himself impelled by a mighty spirit which he was unable to resist.”  As warrior, king, and man, he was head and shoulders above his time.  Gustav Adolf saved religious liberty to the world.  He paid the price with his life, but he would have asked no better fate.  A soldier of God, he met a soldier’s death on the field of battle, in the hour of victory.

A man of destiny he was to his people as to himself.  Long years before his birth, upon the appearance of the comet of 1577, Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, who was deep in the occultism of his day, had predicted that a prince would appear in Finland who would do great things in Germany and deliver the Protestant peoples from the oppression of the popes, and the prophecy was applied to Gustav Adolf by his subjects all through his life.  He was born on December 9, 1594, old style, as they still reckon time in Russia.  Very early he showed the kind of stuff he was made of.  When he was yet almost a baby he was told that there were snakes in the park, and showed fight at once:  “Give me a stick and I will kill them.”  With the years he grew into a handsome youth who read his books, knew his Seneca by heart, was fond of the poets and the great orators, and mastered eight languages, living and dead.  At seventeen he buckled on the sword and put the books away, but kept Xenophon as his friend; for he was a military historian after his own heart.  He was then Duke of Finland.