d attached
little value to any religion, and turned from it with a shrug of the
shoulder when the old ecclesiastical disputes, which even during the
war had never been entirely silenced, began to rage with loud bluster
in the pulpit and the market-place. In many districts the mass of the
people had been compelled, by dragonades and the most, extreme methods
of coercion, to change their persuasion three and four times, and the
formulas of belief were not more valued by them, from their having
learnt them by rote. Thus waste and empty had become the inward life of
the Church, which, together with the coarseness and vices introduced
among men by the long war, gave to the ten years after it an aspect so
peculiarly hopeless. There was little to love, very little to honour
upon earth.

Yet it was just at this period, when each individual felt himself in
constant fear of death, that a kind Providence often interposed to save
them from destruction. Sudden and fearful were the dangers, and equally
sudden and wonderful the rescue. That the strength of man was as
nothing in this terrible game of overwhelming events, was deeply
imprinted on the soul of every one. When the mother with her children
hid herself trembling in the high corn whilst a troop of horsemen were
passing by, and in that moment of danger murmured a prayer with
blanched lips, she naturally ascribed her preservation to the special
protection of a merciful God. If the harassed citizen, in his
hiding-place in the woods, folded his hands and prayed fervently that
the Croats who were plundering the town might not find his concealed
treasure, and afterwards, upon raking up the cinders of his burnt
house, found his silver pieces untouched, he could not help believing
that a special Providence had blinded the greedy eyes of the enemy.
When terrible strokes of fate overtake individuals in rapid succession,
a belief in omens, forebodings, and supernatural warnings is inevitably
fostered. Whilst the superstition of the multitude fixes itself on the
northern lights and falling stars, on ghosts and the cry of the
screech-owl, more polished minds seek to discover the will of the Lord
from dreams and heavenly revelations. The long war had, it is true,
hardened the hearts of men against the miseries of others; it had also
deprived them of all equability of mind; and the vacant gaze into a
desolated world, and cold indifference, were in most only interrupted
by fits of sudden wea