ies, blasphemies, errors, and horrors of the
benighted Popedom have been exterminated in many kingdoms and countries.
Innumerable sheep of the Lord Christ have been fed on the wholesome
pasture of the Divine Word in spite of those monstrous, tearing, ravenous
wolves, the Pope and his followers. The enemy of God and man, the ancient
serpent, may hiss and rage. Yes, the Roman antichrist in his frantic
blusterings may bite off his own tongue, may fulminate all kinds of
evils, bans, excommunications, wars, desolations, and burnings, as long
and as much as he likes. But if we take refuge with the Lord God, what
can this inane, worn-out man and water-bubble do to us?" With more in the
same taste.

The Pope's bull for the Catholic jubilee was far more decorous and lofty
in tone, for it bewailed the general sin in Christendom, and called on
all believers to flee from the wrath about to descend upon the earth, in
terms that were almost prophetic. He ordered all to pray that the Lord
might lift up His Church, protect it from the wiles of the enemy,
extirpate heresies, grant peace and true unity among Christian princes,
and mercifully avert disasters already coming near.

But if the language of Paul V. was measured and decent, the swarm of
Jesuit pamphleteers that forthwith began to buzz and to sting all over
Christendom were sufficiently venomous. Scioppius, in his Alarm Trumpet
to the Holy War, and a hundred others declared that all heresies and
heretics were now to be extirpated, the one true church to be united and
re-established, and that the only road to such a consummation was a path
of blood.

The Lutheran preachers, on the other hand, obedient to the summons from
Dresden, vied with each other in every town and village in heaping
denunciations, foul names, and odious imputations on the Catholics; while
the Calvinists, not to be behindhand with their fellow Reformers,
celebrated the jubilee, especially at Heidelberg, by excluding Papists
from hope of salvation, and bewailing the fate of all churches sighing
under the yoke of Rome.

And not only were the Papists and the Reformers exchanging these blasts
and counterblasts of hatred, not less deadly in their effects than the
artillery of many armies, but as if to make a thorough exhibition of
human fatuity when drunk with religious passion, the Lutherans were
making fierce paper and pulpit war upon the Calvinists. Especially Hoe,
court preacher of John George, ceaselessly