Protestantism in Switzerland - James Aitken Wylie

that the appellants paid their own expenses, seeing
they were prosecuting their own private quarrel,
whereas the citizens defending the cause of the
commonwealth and posterity were entitled to have
their charges defrayed from the public treasury.[15]
On this point the Senate sat deliberating till noon
without coming to any conclusion. Again the cry of
treachery was raised. The patience of the burghers
was exhausted. They sent a detachment of forty
men to inspect all the posts in the city in case of
surprise. The troops marched straight to the
Cathedral of St. Peter. One of them raising his
halberd struck a blow with all his force on a side
door. It was that of a closet in which the idols had
been stowed away. The door was shivered; one of
the images tumbled out, and was broken in pieces
on the stony floor. A beginning having been made,
the idols, one after another, were rolled out, and
soon a pile of fragments -- heads, trunks, and limbs
-- covered the floor. Erasmus wondered that "they
wrought no miracle to save themselves, for if all
accounts were true, prodigies had been done on
more trivial occasions."
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