One of the salient features o f Polish post-Tridentine preaching was the recurrent criticism o f society. All social classes, and especially the nobility, were pilloried for leading sinful lives, which, it was alleged, provoked Providence to visit the Polish Commonwealth with a series o f crippling disasters. The preachers argued further that Poland had been adrift a long time before the devastating war o f 1655-1660 (the ‘Swedish Flood’). The root o f all evil lay in the moral decline o f the Poles, who chose to ignore the way o f life advocated in the Gospels. Nowhere were the consequences of their backslide as appalling as in the relations between the landlords and the peasants. The experience of the Swedish war, when most of the country was occupied by a Protestant army bent on destroying everything that smacked of popery, did not affect the tenor o f the Polish sermons. The triumph o f the infidel over the Catholic gentry was cited as a spectacular proof of the thesis that moral degeneracy must be followed by a fall of the body politic. The way out o f this tragic situation led through moral reform. More specifically, the preachers insisted that without improving the relations between the nobility and the peasants Poland could never hope to regain its former greatness.
