They little knew
the man. He went from victory to victory, less because he was the
greatest general of his day than because he, and all his army with
him, believed himself charged by the Almighty with the defence of
his country and of his faith. The Emperor had attacked both, the
first by attempting to extend his dominion to the Baltic; but
Pommerania and the Baltic provinces were regarded by the Swedish
ruler as the outworks of his kingdom; and Sweden was Protestant.
Hence he drew the sword. "Our brethren in the faith are sighing for
deliverance from spiritual and bodily thraldom," he said to his
people. "Please God, they shall not sigh long." That was his
warrant. Axel Oxenstjerna, his friend and right hand who lived to
finish his work, said of him, "He felt himself impelled by a mighty
spirit which he was unable to resist." As warrior, king, and man, he
was head and shoulders above his time. Gustav Adolf saved religious
liberty to the world. He paid the price with his life, but he would
have asked no better fate. A soldier of God, he met a soldier's
death on the field of battle, in the hour of victory.
A man of destiny he was to his people as to himself. Long years
before his birth, upon the appearance of the comet of 1577, Tycho
Brahe, the astronomer, who was deep in the occultism of his day, had
predicted that a prince would appear in Finland who would do great
things in Germany and deliver the Protestant peoples from the
oppression of the popes, and the prophecy was applied to Gustav
Adolf by his subjects all through his life.
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