which bound individuals more
closely to their states; and in the pauses of the war, and at the
conclusion of it, was of the greatest importance, for it had preserved
the mechanism of the administration.

It was however to the country clergy and their holy office that the
maintenance of the German people is chiefly owing. Their influence was
undoubtedly not less in the Catholic than in the Protestant provinces,
though there remain few accounts of it; for the Catholic village
pastors were then as averse to writing as the evangelical were fond of
it. But the Protestant pastors had a far greater share in the mental
cultivation of their time. The Reformers had made the German learned
education essentially theological, and the village clergy were, in the
estimation of the noble proprietors and peasantry, the representatives
of this intelligence. They were generally well skilled in the ancient
languages, and expert in writing Latin and elegiac verses. They were
powerful disputants, and much experienced in dogmatic controversy,
stubborn and positive, and full of zealous indignation against the
followers of Schwenkfeld, Theophrast, Rosenkreuz, and Weigelia, and
their teaching was more full of hatred to heretics than love towards
their fellow-creatures. Their influence on the consciences of the laity
had made them arrogant and imperious, and the most gifted among them
were more occupied with politics than was good for their characters. If
an order may be considered responsible for the imperfection of the
mental cultivation of the period, which it has not formed, but only
represents, the Lutheran ecclesiastics were deeply and fatally guilty
of the devastation of mind, the unpractical weakness, and the dry
wearisome formalism which frequently appeared in German life. The
ecclesiastics, as an order, were neither accommodating nor especially
estimable, and even their morality was narrow-minded and harsh. But all
these errors they atoned for in times of poverty, calamity, and
persecution, more especially the poor village pastors. They were
exposed to the greatest dangers, hated in general by the Imperial
soldiers, and obliged by their office to bring themselves under the
observation of the enemy; and the rough usage which they, their wives,
and daughters had to suffer, fatally injured their consideration in
their own parish. They were maintained by the contributions of their
parishioners, and were not accustomed, and ill fitted to obt