and politics.

When Ferdinand entered upon the government of his paternal estates of
Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, he found that the new religion, at which
the Jesuits had taught him to shudder as at a curse and a crime, had been
widely spreading. His father had fought against heresy with all his
might, and had died disappointed and broken-hearted at its progress.
His uncle of Bavaria, in letters to his son and nephew, had stamped into
their minds with the enthusiasm of perfect conviction that all happiness
and blessing for governments depended on the restoration and maintenance
of the unity of the Catholic faith. All the evils in times past and
present resulting from religious differences had been held up to the two
youths by the Jesuits in the most glaring colours. The first duty of a
prince, they had inculcated, was to extirpate all false religions, to
give the opponents of the true church no quarter, and to think no
sacrifice too great by which the salvation of human society, brought
almost to perdition by the new doctrines, could be effected.

Never had Jesuits an apter scholar than Ferdinand. After leaving school,
he made a pilgrimage to Loretto to make his vows to the Virgin Mary of
extirpation of heresy, and went to Rome to obtain the blessing of Pope
Clement VIII.

Then, returning to the government of his inheritance, he seized that
terrible two-edged weapon of which the Protestants of Germany had taught
him the use.

"Cujus regio ejus religio;" to the prince the choice of religion, to the
subject conformity with the prince, as if that formula of shallow and
selfish princelings, that insult to the dignity of mankind, were the