A HISTORY OF UNITARIANISM - Starr King School for the Ministry

press. 31 At the Diet in March, 1659 the Jesuit Karwat again set the key in his
opening Diet sermon, in which he urged that for the sake of peace and
prosperity in the country they must resist all efforts to interfere with the state of
religion, and not yield a hair from the decree already passed; and he also
persuaded them to reduce the interval before banishment from three years to
two. 32 The provision was annexed that the decree should not affect any that had
been converted to the Catholic Church, thus preventing any more from going
over to the Reformed Church, as some of the more wealthy had already done.
The fatal date was thus fixed at July 10, 1660 precisely two years from the
passage of the decree. Lest there be any reluctance or failure to enforce it,
however, Cichowski continued his campaign of attack upon the ‘Arian’ cause,
issuing yet seven or eight works after the passage of the decree, in one of which
he under took the defence of those ‘Arians’ that had returned to the Catholic
Church, and in another opposed Catholics in the Diet who favored patient
indulgence to the ‘Arians’, and urged proceeding without hesitation to execute
the decree. 33
It was evident that there had been wide-spread lack of sympathy with the
plan to banish the ‘Arians,’ and that (as has often happened in history, when
laws were passed that did not command general approval) there might in some
quarters be considerable opposition to seriously enforcing the decree. But when
the Diet of 1659 had now confirmed the decree and stiffened its terms, the
hopes of its victims grew steadily dimmer. They still kept trying, indeed, in
influential quarters to win sympathy for their situation, but they now found
themselves seriously driven to plan what should be done if all their efforts
failed. Their predicament was more tragic than can readily be conceived. They
must make the choice between forever leaving their native land, homes,
possessions, life-time friends and kindred, to go out they knew not whither (for