“It can not be denied that several of the Jesuits were men of great learning and science; but their system was to keep the people in ignorance.  Agreeably to this principle they gave their scholars only the rind, and kept to themselves the pulp of literature.  With this view they traveled from town to town as missionaries, and went from house to house, examining all books, which the landlord was compelled under pain of eternal damnation to produce.  The greater part they confiscated and burnt.  They thus endeavored to extinguish the ancient literature of the country, labored to persuade the students that before the introduction of their order into Bohemia nothing but ignorance prevailed, and carefully concealed the learned labors and even the names of our ancestors.”

Ferdinand, having thus bound Bohemia hand and foot, and having accomplished all his purpose in that kingdom, now endeavored, by cautious but very decisive steps, to expel Protestant doctrines from all parts of the German empire.  Decree succeeded decree, depriving Protestants of their rights and conferring upon the Roman Catholics wealth and station.  He had a powerful and triumphant standing army at his control, under the energetic and bigoted Wallenstein, ready and able to enforce his ordinances.  No Protestant prince dared to make any show of resistance.  All the church property was torn from the Protestants, and this vast sum, together with the confiscated territories of those Protestant princes or nobles who had ventured to resist the emperor, placed at his disposal a large fund from which to reward his followers.  The emperor kept, however, a large portion of the spoils in his own hands for the enriching of his own family.

This state of things soon alarmed even the Catholics.  The emperor was growing too powerful, and his power was bearing profusely its natural fruit of pride and arrogance.  The army was insolent, trampling alike upon friend and foe.  As there was no longer any war, the army had become merely the sword of the emperor to maintain his despotism.  Wallenstein had become so essential to the emperor, and possessed such power at the head of the army, that he assumed all the air and state of a sovereign, and insulted the highest nobles and the most powerful bishops by his assumptions of superiority.  The electors of the empire perceiving that the emperor was centralizing power in his own hands, and that they would soon become merely provincial governors, compelled to obey his laws and subject to his appointment and removal, began to whisper to each other their alarm.

The Duke of Bavaria was one of the most powerful princes of the German empire.  He had been the rival of Count Wallenstein, and was now exceedingly annoyed by the arrogance of this haughty military chief.  Wallenstein was the emperor’s right arm of strength.  Inflamed by as intense an ambition as ever burned in a human bosom, every thought and energy was devoted to self-aggrandizement.  He had been educated a