Some General Considerations.
The long period of struggle which followed the reform movement of the sixteenth century seems of comparatively little importance beside the revolt itself; and yet it offers possibilities of treatment which the secondary teacher cannot well afford to neglect. The modern tendency in text-book writing has been to suppress the details of wars in order to allow for a fuller treatment of other phases of development. Assuming that the teachers of the past generation, and not a few of the present day, have been laying too much emphasis on details of this character, the pendulum has seemed at times to swing too far in the direction of elimination and condensation in the treatment of great epoch making wars. Many an opportunity has thereby been neglected of inculcating great truths which could more easily be exemplified by stories drawn from the battlefield than from less stirring episodes. Wars are often presented in so cursory a fashion as to convey little idea of their real character and significance. They become little less than dry summaries of causes and effects and are stripped altogether of that personal element which is so necessary to the attainment of the best results in history teaching. The possibility of utilizing these struggles as a correlating element has usually been farthest from the thought of the teacher, or at best been but imperfectly realized. The religious wars afford the teacher not only the possibility of vivid biographic treatment, but may serve to bind the closer certain common lines of development peculiar to the Europe of the latter part of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century.