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Nor was this an exaggeration, whether we consider the greatness, importance, and prosperity of the city razed, or the fury of its ravagers. In Germany, the tidings of the dreadful fate of Magdeburg caused triumphant joy to the Roman Catholics, while it spread terror and consternation among the Protestants.
Perhaps I and others actually have always believed it, and the only question which is now decided in my behalf, is that I am henceforth to believe that I have only been holding what the apostles held before me. Let me take the doctrine which Protestants consider our greatest difficulty, that of the Immaculate Conception. Here I entreat the reader to recollect my main drift, which is this.
There are instances of superiors in other houses throwing down their command in the midst of the crisis in flat despair, protesting that their subject brethren were no longer governable. Abbots who were inclined to the Reformation could not manage the Catholics; Catholic abbots could not manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots could not manage either the one or the other.
So many Protestants were burned at the stake that England remembers the queen as "bloody Mary"; and so recklessly did she antagonize the spirit of her people that even her husband counselled her to a caution which she despised.
Greatly as the Protestants had grown, she knew they were still a minority in the realm. If the hotter Catholics were fast decreasing, they remained a large and important body. But the mass of the nation was neither Catholic nor Protestant. It had lost faith in the Papacy. It was slowly drifting to a new faith in the Bible.
This apprehension was expressed by a deputation of merchants who were admitted to an audience of the Czar; but they were reassured by the air with which he told them that he knew how to keep priests in order. He was indeed so free from any bigoted attachment to the religion in which he had been brought up that both Papists and Protestants hoped at different times to make him a proselyte.
Superstition is a name generally given to a few only of those beliefs for which it is imagined that there is no sufficient support, such as the belief in ghosts, witches, and, if we are Protestants, in miracles performed after a certain date. Why these particular beliefs have been selected as solely deserving to be called superstitious it is not easy to discover.
Personally, Mary was inclined to any measure which obligation to the Catholic religion might dictate. Contrary to the general wish of her subjects, she married Philip II. Rigorous measures of repression were adopted against the Protestants. A large number of persons, eminent for talents and learning, were put to death on the charge of heresy.
As the Armenian Primate had converted the law, requiring every subject entering into business to provide sureties for his good behavior, into an instrument of oppression, by refusing to accept Protestants as sureties for each other, the Pasha was to see that they had the same liberty, in this respect, as was enjoyed by their countrymen.
The Confederate Commissioners were carried to the castle, and told they might congratulate themselves on not sharing the cell prepared for Glamorgan. "Go back," they were told, "to Kilkenny and tell the President of the Council, that the Protestants of England would fling the King's person out at his window, if they believed it possible that he lent himself to such an undertaking."
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