"What shall I say of the endless evils that accompanied and followed the march of her armies, the desolation of provinces, the plunder of cities, the spoliation of church property, the desecration of altars, the proscription of the virtuous, the exaltation of the unworthy members of society, the horrid mummeries of irreligion practised in many of the conquered cities, the degradation of life and the profanation of death. Such were the calamities that marked the course of these devastating hosts. And yet the evils inflicted by Jacobin France were less intense and less permanent than those exercised by her legislation. In politics the expulsion of the ecclesiastical electors, who, though they had sometimes given in to the false spirit of the age, had ever been the mildest and most benevolent of rulers; the proscription of a nobility that had ever lived in the kindliest relations with its tenantry; and on the ruins of old aristocratic and municipal institutions that had long guarded and sustained popular freedom, a coarse, leveling tyranny, sometimes democratic, sometimes imperial, established; in the church the oppression of the priesthood, a heartless religious indifferentism, undignified even by attempts at philosophic speculation, propagated and encouraged; and through the poisoned channels of education the taint of infidelity transmitted to generations yet unborn. Such were the evils that followed the establishment of the French domination in the conquered provinces of Germany. Doubtless, through the all-wise dispensations of that Providence who bringeth good out of evil, this fearful revolution has partly become, and will yet further become, the occasion of the moral and social regeneration of Europe."[52] The patriot saw his country degraded; but the Christian wept for his absent faith. Rationalism was strongest when national humiliation was deepest. These formed a fitting twinship. It is a scathing comment on the influence of skepticism upon a people that, in general, the highest feeling of nationality is coexistent with the devoutest piety. It is the very nature of infidelity to deaden the emotions of patriotism, and that country can hardly expect to prove successful if it engage in war while its citizens are imbued with religious doubt. If lands are conquered, it knows not how to govern them; if defeated, skepticism affords but little comfort in the night of disaster. We do not attach a fictitious importance to Rationalism when we say that it was the prime agent which prevented the Germans from the struggle of self-liberation, and that the victory of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna would never have been needed had those people remained faithful to the precedents furnished by the Reformers.