ge and bade the convention disperse; and
the delegates, when they had heard, seized them and their clerk and
threw them out of the window "in good old Bohemian fashion." They
fell seventy feet and escaped almost without a scratch, which fact
was accepted by the Catholics of that strenuous day as proof of
their miraculous preservation; by the Protestants as evidence that
the devil ever takes care of his own.

It was the tiny spark that set Europe on fire. Out of it grew the
Thirty Years' War, the most terrible that ever scourged the
civilized world. When Catholic League and Evangelical Union first
mustered their armies, Bohemia had a prosperous population of four
million souls; when the war was over there were less than eight
hundred thousand alive in that unhappy land, and the wolves that
roamed its forests were scarcely more ferocious than the human
starvelings who skulked among the smoking ruins of burned towns and
hamlets. Other states fared little better. Two centuries did not
wipe out the blight of those awful years when rapine and murder,
inspired by bigotry and hate, ran riot in the name of religion.

In the gloom and horror of it all a noble figure stands forth alone.
It were almost worth the sufferings of a Thirty Years' War for the
world to have gained a Gustav Adolf. The "snow-king" the Emperor's
generals named him when he first appeared on German soil at the head
of his army of Northmen, and they prophesied that he would speedily
melt, once the southern sun shone upon his host. They little knew
the man. He went from victory to victory, less because he was the
greatest general of his day than because he, and all his army with
him, believed himself charged by the Almighty with the defence of
his country and of his faith. The Emperor had attacked both, the
first by attempting to extend his dominion to the Baltic; but
Pommerania and the Baltic provinces were regarded by the Swedish
ruler as the outworks of his kingdom; and Sweden was Protestant.
Hence he drew the sword. "Our brethren in the faith are sighing for
deliverance from spiritual and bodily thraldom," he said to his
people. "Please God, they shall not sigh long." That was his
warrant. Axel Oxenstjerna, his friend and right hand who lived to
finish his work, said of him, "He felt himself impelled by a mighty
spirit which he was unable to resist." As warrior, king, and man, he
was head and shoulders above his time. Gustav Adolf saved religious
liberty