and trampled it under his feet. One Professor was
so deeply in debt that he could not pay his creditors, "if every hair on
his head were a ducat." Another was "in bed with seven wounds received
in a fall when he was coming home drunk." Some read their newspapers at
church-service. Nor did the wives and daughters of the Professors lead
any better life. They were guilty of deeds of the grossest immorality,
such indeed as would disgrace a less enlightened people than the Germans
at that period.[23]

The great moral decline of the clergy was confined chiefly to the
Lutheran church. The Reformed was earnest, pious, and aggressive. At
this very time it was endeavoring to spread the leaven of the Gospel
through other lands. It was, during the whole period, the conservative
power of Protestantism. As might be expected, it suffered somewhat from
the declension of Lutheranism; but it stood manfully up to the crisis,
and met the issues with an heroic spirit. When the Roman Catholics saw
these excesses of the Lutherans, and witnessed the return to their fold
of many Protestants who had become disgusted with the vices of their
brethren, they rejoiced greatly, and used every available means to bring
back more of their erring friends.

We must remember, however, that it was the clergy and not the laity, who
were the agents of the great declension. The theologians had submerged
the land in fruitless controversy; they hesitated not to commit open sin
when occasion demanded it; they neglected the youth of the whole
country; the ignorant peasantry were not blessed with even the crumbs of
truth; the pulpit was perverted to a cathedra for the declamation of the
hyperbolical rhetoric that a corrupt taste had imported from Spain and
Italy: the Apocrypha was the all-important part of the Bible; and the
private life of the clergy was corrupt and odious to the Christian
conscience. "What wonder that the piety of the people suffered a similar
decline? Let the ministry be steadfast, and the masses will never
swerve." The result in the present case was, that the latter gradually
became imbued with the same impiety that they had learned, to their
sorrow, of the former.

Glancing first at the cultivated circles, we find a practical
indifference well nigh akin to skepticism beginning to prevail among the
noble and wealthy. The deference which the Reformers paid to the princes
led the latter to a too free exercise of their power, and there are
numbe