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was their custom, they were arrested and imprisoned, often in dungeons, where many died from starvation, cold, and violent treatment, and others contracted diseases of which they died soon after their release; and finally large numbers were sent to Vienna, and there condemned without trial to serve in the wars with the Turks, or as oarsmen on Mediterranean galleys. And so the weary years passed until the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War necessitated conciliation, when the Schwenkfelders accepted the horrors of that prolonged struggle as a grateful change from the cruelties of religious persecution. But soon after the peace of Westphalia the old persecutions were renewed with, if possible, increased rigor. From 1650 until 1658 they were especially severe.

Amid all these persecutions, without churches, without organization, robbed to a great extent of their religious books, and forbidden under severe penalties to reprint those that had been committed to the flames, the Schwenkfelders maintained their faith and their worship in the Fatherland for more than two centuries. The Bible was, indeed, allowed to them, and of this they were diligent readers; and, notwithstanding the efforts to suppress their literature, copies of Schwenkfeld's works and the sermons and other writings of Johann Sigismund Werner, Michael Hiller, Erasmus Weichenhan, and Christian Hoburg were here and there preserved, and these served the multitude who met at the houses of their possessors to hear them read. The entire Sabbath, from morning till night, was spent in worship and in listening to the reading of such books.

Martin John, a learned physician of Hockenau, who wrote in the latter part of the seventeenth century, says: "Whoever had books, read on Sundays, and the others went to hear. The order was thus: In the morning, after each one had prayed when he rose from his bed, they assembled and sang the morning song standing; then they prayed from a prayer-book and