and to mingle his tears with theirs.

Could a single phantom have risen from one of the many thousand graves
where human beings had been thrust alive by his decree, perhaps there
might have been an answer to the question propounded by the Emperor amid
all that piteous weeping. Perhaps it might have told the man who asked
his hearers to be forgiven if he had ever unwittingly offended them, that
there was a world where it was deemed an offence to torture, strangle,
burn, and drown one's innocent fellow-creatures. The usual but trifling
excuse for such enormities can not be pleaded for the Emperor. Charles
was no fanatic. The man whose armies sacked Rome, who laid his
sacrilegious hands on Christ's vicegerent, and kept the infallible head
of the Church a prisoner to serve his own political ends, was then no
bigot. He believed in nothing; save that when the course of his imperial
will was impeded, and the interests of his imperial house in jeopardy,
pontiffs were to succumb as well as anabaptists. It was the political
heresy which lurked in the restiveness of the religious reformers under
dogma, tradition, and supernatural sanction to temporal power, which he
was disposed to combat to the death. He was too shrewd a politician not
to recognize the connection between aspirations for religious and for
political freedom. His hand was ever ready to crush both heresies in one.
Had he been a true son of the Church, a faithful champion of her
infallibility, he would not have submitted to the peace of Passau, so
long as he could bring a soldier to the field. Yet he acquiesced in the
Reformation for Germany, while the fires for burning the reformers were
ever blazing in the Netherlands, where it was death even to allude to the
existence of the peace of Passau. Nor did he acquiesce only from
compulsion, for long before his memorable defeat by Maurice, he had
permitted the German troops, with whose services he could not dispense,
regularly to attend Protestant worship performed by their own Protestant
chaplains. Lutheran preachers marched from city to city of the
Netherlands under the imperial banner, while the subjects of those
patrimonial provinces were daily suffering on the scaffold for their
nonconformity. The influence of this garrison-preaching upon the progress
of the Reformation in the Netherlands is well known. Charles hated
Lutherans, but he required soldiers, and he thus helped by his own policy
to disseminate what had he b