92 Historical Sketches of the Foreign Missions of the Seventh-day Adventists
prohibiting even private owners from wasting their forests without
regard to the public good.
Here and there, crowning the loftiest and most inaccessible heights,
we see an ancient castle, often in ruins, but sometimes kept in repair
and still inhabited. Those old battlements must have an eventful history.
Some of them, like the Wartburg, were the refuge of the Protestants
in the time of the Reformation. Could those moss-grown walls but
tell what has transpired within their strongholds, or in the mountain
fastnesses around them, we would hear stories of thrilling interest
connected with the lives of the defenders of the faith. Those witnesses
for the truth were hunted down by the fury of their persecutors, driven
into dens and mountains and caves of the earth, because they honored
the law of God above the precepts of the church of Rome.
Only by terrible struggles has the right of religious liberty been
maintained. When the stake and the scaffold proved ineffectual to
destroy the Reformation in Germany, popery summoned her armies,
the Catholic States banded together to crush out Protestantism, and for
thirty years the tempests of war swept over these now fertile plains and
populous cities. At the opening of the thirty years war, in 1618, the
country had reached a high state of prosperity. It is said that at that time
the methods of cultivation were fully equal to those of 1818. “Germany
was accounted a rich country. Under the influence of a long peace its
towns had enlarged in size, its villages had increased in number, and
its smiling fields testified to the excellence of its husbandry. The early
dew of the Reformation was not yet exhaled. The sweet breath of that
morning gave it a healthy moral vigor, quickened its art and industry,
and filled the land with all good things. Wealth abounded in the cities,
and even the country people lived in circumstances of comfort and
ease.” Since the Reformation, a school had existed in every town and
village in which there was a church, and a knowledge of reading and
writing was generally diffused among the people. The Bible had found
its way into their houses. The hymns of Luther were sung in their
churches and their homes.
But during the terrible years that followed, all this was changed.
Foreign soldiery, savage and blood-besmeared, traversed the coun-
try, marking their course by pillage, fire, and murder. The greatest
imaginable horrors were so common that it was a matter of surprise
when they failed to be perpetrated. At the approach of the troops, the