nd for half a century rendered it
the scene of the most mournful disorders. It was the Reformation, too,
that rendered the Spanish yoke intolerable to the Flemings, and awakened
in them both the desire and the courage to throw off its fetters, while
it also principally furnished them with the means of their emancipation.
And as to England, all the evils with which Philip the Second threatened
Elizabeth, were mainly intended in revenge for her having taken his
Protestant subjects under her protection, and placing herself at the
head of a religious party which it was his aim and endeavour to
extirpate. In Germany, the schisms in the church produced also a
lasting political schism, which made that country for more than a
century the theatre of confusion, but at the same time threw up a firm
barrier against political oppression. It was, too, the Reformation
principally that first drew the northern powers, Denmark and Sweden,
into the political system of Europe; and while on the one hand the
Protestant League was strengthened by their adhesion, it on the other
was indispensable to their interests. States which hitherto scarcely
concerned themselves with one another's existence, acquired through the
Reformation an attractive centre of interest, and began to be united by
new political sympathies. And as through its influence new relations
sprang up between citizen and citizen, and between rulers and subjects,
so also entire states were forced by it into new relative positions.
Thus, by a strange course of events, religious disputes were the means
of cementing a closer union among the nations of Europe.

Fearful indeed, and destructive, was the first movement in which this
general political sympathy announced itself; a desolating war of thirty
years, which, from the interior of Bohemia to the mouth of the Scheldt,
and from the banks of the Po to the coasts of the Baltic, devastated
whole countries, destroyed harvests, and reduced towns and villages to
ashes; which opened a grave for many thousand combatants, and for half a
century smothered the glimmering sparks of civilization in Germany, and
threw back the improving manners of the country into their pristine
barbarity and wildness. Yet out of this fearful war Europe came forth
free and independent. In it she first learned to recognize herself as a
community of nations; and this intercommunion of states, which
originated in the thirty years' war, may alone be sufficient to
rec