“The king of Sweden is an enemy both prudent and brave, inured to war, and in the flower of his age. His plans are excellent, his resources considerable, his subjects enthusiastically attached to him. His army,—composed of Swedes, Germans, Livonians, Finlanders, Scots, and English,—by its devoted obedience to their leader, is blended into one nation. He is a gamester, in playing with whom not to have lost is to have won a great deal.” Gustavus was beginning to make a strong position in northern Germany, when he received an envoy from the elector of Brandenburg, urging him to consent to an armistice, the elector offering himself as a mediator between the Swedish king and the Catholic league. Gustavus thus answered this weak and cowardly advice of the elector:— “I have listened to the arguments by which my lord and brother-in-law would seek to dissuade me from the war, but could well have expected another communication from him; namely, that God having helped me thus far, and come, as I am, into this land for no other end than to deliver its poor and oppressed estates and people from the horrible tyranny of the thieves and robbers who have plagued it so long, above all, to free his highness from like tribulation, he would rather have joined himself with me, and thus not failed to seize the opportunity which God has wonderfully vouchsafed him. Or does not his highness yet know that the intention of the emperor and of the league is this,—not to cease till the evangelical religion is quite rooted out of the empire, and that he himself has nothing else to look forward to than to be compelled either to deny his faith or to forsake his land? For God’s sake, let him bethink himself a little, and for once grasp manly counsels. For myself, I cannot go back.... I seek in this work not mine own things, no profit at all except the safety of my kingdom; else have I nothing from it but expense, weariness, toil, and danger of life and limb.... For this, I say plainly beforehand, I will hear and know nothing of neutrality; his highness must be friend or foe. When I come to his borders, he must declare himself hot or cold. The battle is one between God and the devil. Will his highness hold with God, let him stand on my side; if he prefer to hold with the devil, then he must fight with me.”