fest any special zeal for the Catholic Church nor any special aversion
to Protestantism, unless when it threatened the throne.

Third--Immediately after the massacre Charles despatched an envoy
extraordinary to each of the courts of Europe, conveying the startling
intelligence that the King and royal family had narrowly escaped from a
horrible conspiracy, and that its authors had been detected and summarily
punished. The envoys, in their narration, carefully suppressed any
allusion to the indiscriminate massacre which had taken place, but
announced the event in the following words: On that "memorable night, by
the destruction of a few seditious men, the King had been delivered from
immediate danger of death, and the realm from the perpetual terror of
civil war."

Pope Gregory XIII., to whom also an envoy was sent, acting on this garbled
information, ordered a "Te Deum" to be sung, and a commemorative medal to
be struck in thanksgiving to God, not for the massacre, of which he was
utterly ignorant, but for the preservation of the French King from an
untimely and violent death, and of the French nation from the horrors of a
civil war.

Sismondi, a Protestant historian, tells us that the Pope's nuncio in Paris
was purposely kept in ignorance of the designs of Charles; and Ranke, in
his _History of the Civil Wars_, informs us that Charles and his mother
suddenly left Paris in order to avoid an interview with the Pope's legate,
who arrived soon after the massacre; their guilty conscience fearing, no
doubt, a rebuke from the messenger of the Vicar of Christ, from whom the
real facts were not long concealed.

Fourth--It is scarcely necessary to vindicate the innocence of the Bishops
and clergy of France in this transaction, as no author, how hostile soever
to the Church, has ever, to my knowledge, accused them of any complicity
in the heinous massacre.

On the contrary, they used their best efforts to arrest the progress of
the assailants, to prevent further bloodshed and to protect the lives of
the fugitives. More than three hundred Calvinists were sheltered from the
assassins by taking refuge in the house of the Archbishop of Lyons. The
Bishops of Lisieux, Bordeaux, Toulouse and of other cities offered similar
protection to those who sought safety in their homes.

Thus we see that the Church slept in tranquil ignorance of the stormy
scene until she was aroused to a knowledge of the tempest by the sudden
uproar it creat