his successor, was the work of an eighty years' war, in the course of
which millions of lives were sacrificed. Yet the abdicating Emperor had
summoned his faithful estates around him, and stood up before them in his
imperial robes for the last time, to tell them of the affectionate regard
which he had always borne them, and to mingle his tears with theirs.

Could a single phantom have risen from one of the many thousand graves
where human beings had been thrust alive by his decree, perhaps there
might have been an answer to the question propounded by the Emperor amid
all that piteous weeping. Perhaps it might have told the man who asked
his hearers to be forgiven if he had ever unwittingly offended them, that
there was a world where it was deemed an offence to torture, strangle,
burn, and drown one's innocent fellow-creatures. The usual but trifling
excuse for such enormities can not be pleaded for the Emperor. Charles
was no fanatic. The man whose armies sacked Rome, who laid his
sacrilegious hands on Christ's vicegerent, and kept the infallible head
of the Church a prisoner to serve his own political ends, was then
no bigot. He believed in nothing; save that when the course of his
imperial will was impeded, and the interests of his imperial house in
jeopardy, pontiffs were to succumb as well as anabaptists. It was the
political heresy which lurked in the restiveness of the religious
reformers under dogma, tradition, and supernatural sanction to temporal
power, which he was disposed to combat to the death. He was too shrewd a
politician not to recognize the connection between aspirations for
religious and for political freedom. His hand was ever ready to crush
both heresies in one. Had he been a true son of the Church, a faithful
champion of her infallibility, he would not have submitted to the peace
of Passau, so long as he could bring a soldier to the field. Yet he
acquiesced in the Reformation for Germany, while the fires for burning
the reformers were ever blazing in the Netherlands, where it was death