The drama is so vast, the cataclysm so appalling, that even at this day we are hardly removed from it far enough to take it fully in.

The mind is oppressed, the imagination flags under the load imposed upon it.

The capture and sack of a town one can fairly conceive: the massacre, outrage, the flaming roofs, the desolation.

Even the devastation of a province can be approximately reproduced in thought.

But what thought can embrace the devastation and destruction of all the civilised portions of Europe, Africa, and Asia?
Who can realise a Thirty Years War lasting five hundred years?
a devastation of the Palatinate extending through fifteen generations?
If we try to insert into the picture, as we undoubtedly should do, the founding of the new, which was going on beside this destruction of the old, the settling down of the barbarian hosts in the conquered provinces, the expansion of the victorious Church, driving paganism from the towns to the country and at last extinguishing it entirely, the effort becomes more difficult than ever.