The
church was in trouble.
Even
though some orders did much to keep the material away,
Its
walls were being eaten by the white maggots of corruption.
Clergy
lived in excess.
They
would indulge.
The
sinners they counseled would have to indulge with them.
A
man came to stand up to the church.
He
nailed his thoughts to the door
Not
intending to start a new one.
Then
a firestorm of reformation and counter-reformation began.
Churches
broke from the main one.
Catholicism
declined.
Wars
were fought on land and sea.
Internal
and external persecution.
England
shifted between religious alliances.
Both
passed laws against the other.
Nostradamus
made his predictions
As
new bouts of Black Death took lives.
People
traveled outward winning converts.
A
Protestant war of thirty years came.
France
emerged from the war.
Another
civil war came to England
As
Oliver Cromwell tried to unite the isles.
A
glorious revolution for religious toleration.
Then
a great fire scorched London
In
the year with three sixes.
King
Louis XIV
Ended
his era with the building of Versailles,
A
war against the Spanish Empire,
The
expansion of his own,
And
his death.
