The Catholic World, Vol. 08, October, 1868, to March, 1869.

Few historical events have been more persistently used in arguments against the Catholic Church than the massacre of Admiral Coligny, and a great number of Protestant nobles and people, at Paris, on St. Bartholomew's day, 1572, by orders emanating from the court.
Isolated from the religious wars in which it is but one of the darkest episodes, this affair has been set forward as an independent act—a deliberate scheme of the Catholic party in France—king, nobles, and clergy—to extinguish Protestantism at a single blow. The numbers of the victims have been exaggerated to an extent incompatible with all contemporary statistics of population; and the massacre of St. Bartholomew has thus been transmitted, as if by a series of distorting mirrors, from the pamphlets of the time to the histories, sermons, periodicals, and school-books of our days, each reflection but a distortion of the last, and so exceeding it in unreality that at length truth had become utterly hopeless.
In fact, we might as well expect to have Bibles throw out the long-sanctioned misprint of strain at a gnat, and print, correctly, strain out a gnat, or omit the intrusive words at the end of the Lord's Prayer, which all Protestant Biblical scholars admit to be spurious, as to expect popular accounts of St. Bartholomew's day to come down to what is really certain and authentic.
Even among writers of a higher stamp, there seemed to be a disposition to avoid research that would break the charm. Historical scholars made little effort to free the subject from the mists and fables with which it has been encompassed, and set down only well-attested facts with authorities to sustain them. It is, therefore, with no less surprise than gratification that we find in the recent work of Henry White a laborious and thorough examination of the evidence still extant as to the originators of the dark deed, their motives and object, the extent of the slaughter, and the reasons assigned at the moment and subsequently. It is one of those subjects in which no work will be accepted entirely by readers of an opposite faith, inasmuch as it is almost impossible to avoid drawing inferences, and ascribing motives for acts, to real or supposed modes of thought in the religious body to which the actors belonged.