unity
from its devastations; but, by and by, they too were visited; and all
that remained were a decimated population and smoking ruins.

Pastoral work was necessarily neglected. Large sections of the country
were deprived of all spiritual cultivation and oversight. The children
were deprived of both their natural protectors and those guardians whom
the church had provided for them. Out of ten hundred and forty-six
pastors in Wuertemberg, for example, only three hundred and thirty were
left by the ravages of war. Food could hardly be provided for the
Seminary students, few as these were; for nearly all the young men had
been compelled to yield to the repeated conscriptions. The princes
themselves were in many cases driven from their jurisdiction; and when
the prince was gone the church was usually disorganized. Duke Eberhard
of Wuertemberg and many of the Rhenish rulers were compelled to seek an
asylum in Strasburg. The Margrave of Baden-Durlach was a refugee to
Switzerland; Dukes Adolph Frederic I. and John II. of Mecklenburg fled
to Luebeck.[17]

The desolation caused by this protracted war baffles all description. No
writer has been competent for it. Schiller found it a task to which even
his fervid imagination and glowing diction could not measure. Wherever
it went it left destruction in its path. The population of Bohemia was
reduced from three millions to seven hundred and eighty thousand. Only a
fiftieth part of the inhabitants of the Rhine-lands were left alive.
Saxony lost nine hundred thousand of her citizens within the brief space
of two years. The city of Augsburg could number only eighteen thousand
out of her enterprising population of eighty thousand. In 1646 alone,
Bavaria saw more than one hundred of her thriving towns laid in ashes;
while little Hesse lost seventeen cities, forty-seven castles, and four
hundred towns.

The cruelty which characterized some of the participants in this war may
be conceived from the awful scene of the siege of Magdeburg; a picture
for which, says Schiller, "History has no speech, and Poetry no pencil."
"Neither childhood, nor age," another author affirms, "nor sex, nor
rank, nor beauty were able to disarm the conqueror's wrath. Wives were
mishandled in the arms of their husbands, daughters at the feet of their
fathers. Women were found beheaded in a church, whilst the troopers
amused themselves by throwing infants into the flames, or by spearing
sucklings at their mother