o
recover. The mistake they made and the injustice they showed consisted
in not taking into, account all the good that Henry IV. had done them and
was daily doing them, and in calling upon him, at a moment's notice, to
secure to them by an edict all the good that it was not in his power to
do them. We purpose just to give a brief summary of the ameliorations
introduced into their position under him, even before the edict of
Nantes, and to transfer the responsibility for all they still lacked to
the cause indicated by themselves in their plaints, when they take to
task all the French on the Catholic side, who, in the sixteenth century,
disregarded in France the rights of creed and of religious life, just as
the Protestants themselves disregarded them in England so far as the
Catholics were concerned.

One fact immediately deserves to be pointed out; and that is the number
and the practical character of meetings officially held at this period by
the Protestants: an indisputable proof of the liberty they enjoyed.
These meetings were of two sorts; one, the synods, were for the purpose
of regulating their faith, their worship, their purely religious affairs.
Between 1594 and 1609, under the sway of Henry IV., Catholic king, seven
national synods of the Protestant church in France held their sessions in
seven different towns, and discussed with perfect freedom such questions
of religious doctrine and discipline as were interesting to them. At the
same epoch, between 1593 and 1608, the French Protestants met at eleven
assemblies, specially summoned to deliberate, not in these cases upon
questions of faith and religious discipline, but upon their temporal and
political interests, upon their relations towards the state, and upon the
conduct they were to adopt under the circumstances of their times. The
principle to which minds, and even matters, to a certain extent, have now
attained, the deep-seated separation between the civil and the religious
life, and their mutual independence, this higher principle was unknown to
the sixteenth century; the believer and the citizen were then but one,
and the efforts of laws and governments were directed towards bringing
the whole nation entire into the same state of unity. And as they did
not succeed therein, their attempts produced strife instead of unity, war
instead of peace. When the French Protestants of the sixteenth century
met in the assemblies which they themselves called poli