They then, with eight others, their property being confiscated, in utter beggary, were driven as vagabonds from the kingdom. The rest, after being impoverished by fines, were restored to liberty. Ferdinand adopted vigorous measures to establish his despotic power. Considering the Protestant religion as peculiarly hostile to despotism, in the encouragement it afforded to education, to the elevation of the masses, and to the diffusion of those principles of fraternal equality which Christ enjoined; and considering the Catholic religion as the great bulwark of kingly power, by the intolerance of the Church teaching the benighted multitudes subjection to civil intolerance, Ferdinand, with unceasing vigilance, and with melancholy success, endeavored to eradicate the Lutheran doctrines from the kingdom. He established the most rigorous censorship of the press, and would allow no foreign work, unexamined, to enter the realm. He established in Bohemia the fanatic order of the Jesuits, and intrusted to them the education of the young. It is often impossible to reconcile the inconsistencies of the human heart. Ferdinand, while guilty of such atrocities, affected, on some points, the most scrupulous punctilios of honor. The clearly-defined privileges which had been promised the Protestants, he would not infringe in the least. They were permitted to give their children Protestant teachers, and to conduct worship in their own way. He effected his object of changing Bohemia from an elective to a hereditary monarchy, and thus there was established in Bohemia the renowned doctrine of regal legitimacy; of the _divine right_ of kings to govern. With such a bloody hand was the doctrine of the sovereignty, not of the _people_, but of the _nobles_, overthrown in Bohemia. The nobles are not much to be commiserated, for they trampled upon the people as mercilessly as the king did upon them. It is merely another illustration of the old and melancholy story of the strong devouring the weak: the owl takes the wren; the eagle the owl. Bohemia, thus brought in subjection to a single mind, and shackled in its spirit of free enterprise, began rapidly to exhibit symptoms of decline and decay. It was a great revolution, accomplished by cunning and energy, and maintained by the terrors of confiscation, exile and death.