It was no less the interest of the landed proprietor and his officials, than of the peasant himself, to preserve the villages. The smaller the number of tax-payers became, the higher was the tax on the few who remained. The rulers, from the cities in which they resided occupied themselves during the whole war through their officials, bailiffs, and receivers, with the fate of the villages, nay even of individuals. The keeping of the parish records was only interrupted during the most troubled time, and was always recommenced. Certificates, reports, memorials, and rescripts passed hither and thither amidst all the misery.[29] Petitions for remission of rents and liquidation of costs were incessantly demanded, and many a poor schoolmaster obediently gave his service as parish writer whilst the snow floated into his schoolroom through the shattered windows, the parish chests lay broken in the streets, and the parishioners, whose accounts he was writing, went armed into the woods with dark illegal projects, which were never reported to the government. Useless as this system of writing in many cases was, it formed numerous links which bound individuals more closely to their states; and in the pauses of the war, and at the conclusion of it, was of the greatest importance, for it had preserved the mechanism of the administration. It was however to the country clergy and their holy office that the maintenance of the German people is chiefly owing. Their influence was undoubtedly not less in the Catholic than in the Protestant provinces, though there remain few accounts of it; for the Catholic village pastors were then as averse to writing as the evangelical were fond of it. But the Protestant pastors had a far greater share in the mental cultivation of their time. The Reformers had made the German learned education essentially theological, and the village clergy were, in the estimation of the noble proprietors and peasantry, the representatives of this intelligence. They were generally well skilled in the ancient languages, and expert in writing Latin and elegiac verses. They were powerful disputants, and much experienced in dogmatic controversy, stubborn and positive, and full of zealous indignation against the followers of Schwenkfeld, Theophrast, Rosenkreuz, and Weigelia, and their teaching was more full of hatred to heretics than love towards their fellow-creatures. Their influence on the consciences of the laity had made them arrogant and imperious, and the most gifted among them were more occupied with politics than was good for their characters. If an order may be considered responsible for the imperfection of the mental cultivation of the period, which it has not formed, but only represents, the Lutheran ecclesiastics were deeply and fatally guilty of the devastation of mind, the unpractical weakness, and the dry wearisome formalism which frequently appeared in German life. The ecclesiastics,