It is difficult to judge how far this liberal tendency of Protestantism would have led the nation, if adversity had not come upon them. The great war, however, gave rise to a peculiar apathy even in the best. Each party engaged bore a token of their faith upon their banners, each brought endless misfortune upon the people, and in all, it was apparent how little baptism and the Lord's Supper availed to make the professors of any confession good men. When the flames of war were dying away, men were much inclined to attribute a great portion of their own misery and that of the country to the strife of the contending persuasions. It naturally followed that the colder children of the world attached little value to any religion, and turned from it with a shrug of the shoulder when the old ecclesiastical disputes, which even during the war had never been entirely silenced, began to rage with loud bluster in the pulpit and the market-place. In many districts the mass of the people had been compelled, by dragonades and the most, extreme methods of coercion, to change their persuasion three and four times, and the formulas of belief were not more valued by them, from their having learnt them by rote. Thus waste and empty had become the inward life of the Church, which, together with the coarseness and vices introduced among men by the long war, gave to the ten years after it an aspect so peculiarly hopeless. There was little to love, very little to honour upon earth. Yet it was just at this period, when each individual felt himself in constant fear of death, that a kind Providence often interposed to save them from destruction. Sudden and fearful were the dangers, and equally sudden and wonderful the rescue. That the strength of man was as nothing in this terrible game of overwhelming events, was deeply imprinted on the soul of every one. When the mother with her children hid herself trembling in the high corn whilst a troop of horsemen were passing by, and in that moment of danger murmured a prayer with blanched lips, she naturally ascribed her preservation to the special protection of a merciful God. If the harassed citizen, in his hiding-place in the woods, folded his hands and prayed fervently that the Croats who were plundering the town might not find his concealed treasure, and afterwards, upon raking up the cinders of his burnt house, found his silver pieces untouched, he could not help believing that a special Providence had blinded the greedy eyes of the enemy. When terrible strokes of fate overtake individuals in rapid succession, a belief in omens, forebodings, and supernatural warnings is inevitably fostered. Whilst the superstition of the multitude fixes itself on the northern lights and falling stars, on ghosts and the cry of the screech-owl, more polished minds seek to discover the will of the Lord from dreams and heavenly revelations. The long war had, it is true, hardened the hearts of men against the miseries of others; it had also