the present day, the community of France, nation and government,
all the while that they proclaim this great and salutary truth, do not
altogether understand and admit its full bearing. The sixteenth century
was completely ignorant of it; Leaguers and Huguenots were equally
convinced that they possessed, in the matter of religion, the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that they were in their right
to propagate its empire at any price. Thence arose, in respect of
religious peace, and of Henry IV., who naturally desired it as the
requirement and the wish of France, a great governmental difficulty.

It is honorable to human nature that it never submits freely and
sincerely to anything but what it considers not only useful, but
essentially true and just; its passions bow to principles only; wherever
the higher principle is wanting, there also is wanting the force that
compels respect from passion. Now the fanatics, Leaguer and Huguenot,
had a fixed principle; with the former, it was the religious sovereignty
of the pope, as representative and depositary of the unity of the
Christian church; with the others, it was the negation of this
sovereignty and the revindication of the free regimen of the primitive
Christian church. To these fixed and peremptory principles the
government of Henry IV. had nothing similar to oppose; it spoke in the
name of social interests, of the public peace, and of mutual toleration;
all excellent reasons, but with merits consisting in their practical
soundness, not in their logical connection with the superior principle to
which the sixteenth century had not yet attained. It was all very well
for Henry IV. to maintain the cause and to have the support of the great
majority in France; but outside of this majority he was incessantly
encountering and incessantly having to put down or to humor two parties,
or rather factions, full of discontent and as irreconcilable with him as
among themselves, for it was not peace and tolerance that they demanded
of him, but victory and supremacy in the name of absolute right.

This, then, was the scene; on one side a great majority of Catholics and
Protestants favorable for different practical reasons to Henry IV.
turned Catholic king; on the other, two minorities, one of stubborn
Catholics of the League, the other of Protestants anxious for their creed
and their liberty; both discontented and distrustful. Such, after Henry
IV.'s abjuratio