n the Palatinate, the end can only be blood and misery?
Thou beauteous Palatinate! what Guises and Albas await thee. It seems
to me as if I heard the roarings of the cataract which hurries our
little bark to its destruction, whilst the crew quarrel among
themselves." Such were the thoughts thronging through the imprisoned
statesman's head, as he looked out over the tops of the chestnut trees
at the old Waldburg, the former cradle of the Counts Palatine.
His hand played in the meantime with a bundle of papers, whose
official character was marked out by the blue and white tape of the
Chancellory of the Palatinate. Eventually he opened and read them. An
ironical smile played over his lips. "General of the Arians and
Commander-in-chief of the Devil's hosts, I am advancing in my career of
Antichrist;" and he seized a pen as if to write an answer to this bill
of indictment; but rage suddenly overmastered him, he flung pen and
papers aside. What was the use of answering people who were determined
to destroy him, and made use of forged letters to that end? The former
friendship of the Kurfuerst would protect him from the rack and
ill-treatment, of that he might be certain. His enemies would be well
satisfied by getting rid of him. Banishment would be his fate, he
thought. To create attention by heavy punishments and severe laws was
against the interests of the Church council owing to the weak condition
of Calvinism in Germany, and the physician to whom the whole world was
open felt reconciled at beginning his travels anew. With a feeling of
mingled contempt and disgust he threw down the papers after throwing a
cursory glance over them. He, the faithful Zwingliite, to be accused of
having founded a conspiracy to make the Pfalz unitarian, or as the
Gentlemen of the Church Council chose to express it, mahommedan.
"Because all the heads of the Unitarians, Servetus, Blandrata, Socinus,
were physicians, naturally the physician Erastus must be one also," he
laughed mockingly to himself. "Parsons' logic of the Hogstraten School!
Be contented with my head, but the satisfaction of praying for mercy,
will I never grant to either Olevianus or Ursinus.... They wished to
extract on the rack from the weakminded fugitives, an account of my
opinions," he added shaking his head, "thus are they all these lowly
men of God."

As far as he himself was concerned the matter was at an end, but
anxiety for Lydia weighed heavily upon him. How could his c