them to dictate to their
fellow-creatures those relations, or to dogmatize concerning those
conditions--to take possession of their consciences in short, and to
interpose their mummeries between man and his Creator--it is, probable
that such scenes as caused the nations to shudder, throughout so large a
portion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will continue to
repeat themselves at intervals in various parts of the earth. Nothing can
be more sublime than the self-sacrifice, nothing more demoniac than the
crimes, which human creatures have seemed always ready to exhibit under
the name of religion.

It was and had been really civil war in France. In the Netherlands it had
become essentially a struggle for independence against a foreign monarch;
although the germ out of which both conflicts had grown to their enormous
proportions was an effort of the multitude to check the growth of papacy.
In France, accordingly, civil war, attended by that gaunt sisterhood,
murder, pestilence, and famine, had swept from the soil almost everything
that makes life valuable. It had not brought in its train that
extraordinary material prosperity and intellectual development at which
men wondered in the Netherlands, and to which allusion has just been
made. But a fortunate conjunction of circumstances had now placed Henry
of Navarre in a position of vantage. He represented the principle of
nationality, of French unity. It was impossible to deny that he was in
the regular line of succession, now that luckless Henry of Valois slept
with his fathers, and the principle of nationality might perhaps prove as
vital a force as attachment to the Roman Church. Moreover, the adroit and
unscrupulous Bearnese knew well how to shift the mantle of religion from
one shoulder to the other, to serve his purposes or the humours of those
whom he addressed.

"The King of Spain would exclude me from the kingdom and heritage of my
father because of my religion," he said to the Duke of Saxony; "but in
that religion I am determined to persist so long as I shall live." The
hand was the hand of Henry, but it was the voice of Duplessis Mornay.

"Were there thirty crowns to win," said he, at about the same time to the
States of France, "I would not change my religion on compulsion, the
dagger at my throat. Instruct me, instruct me, I am not obstinate." There
spoke the wily freethinker, determined not to be juggled out of what he
considered his property by fan