INTRODUCTION.
The Reformation of the sixteenth century is the greatest event of modern times. It has remodelled everything in Protestant countries; and has modified almost everything in Roman Catholic countries—religious and moral doctrines, ecclesiastical and civil institutions, the arts and sciences, in such sort that it is impossible to advance a step in the investigation of an idea, or a fact whatsoever, without meeting this immense work face to face. The Reformation marks the starting-point of a new world: God alone knows its development and its end.
It is important to examine how, in the first years of the sixteenth century, it arose out of the intellectual wants and the general conscience, of mankind. It was at the same time the expression of a profound state of uneasiness, the means of a mighty improvement, and the pledge of a progress towards a better future.
The Papacy, without doubt, had rendered more than one service to Christianity in the barbarous ages. It would be unjust to refuse it the honour of having served as a centre of European unity, and of having often made right prevail over brute force. But gradually as the peoples advanced, Rome became less capable of leading them, and when she dared to erect herself as an impassable barrier before the double action of the spirit of God and the spirit of man, she received a wound which, notwithstanding vain appearances, widens from generation to generation.
In matters of belief and of worship, Roman Catholicism had admitted, by ignorance or by design, many of the Pagan elements. Without denying the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, it had disfigured and mutilated them to the extent of rendering them difficult of recognition. It was the world, to say sooth, which, forcing en masse the doors of the Christian church, had borne in with it its demigods under the name of saints, its rites, its feasts, its consecrated spots, its lustral water, its sacerdotal system; everything, in fine, to the very insignia of its priests; so much so that polytheism survived itself, in great measure, under the garb of the religion of Christ.
This mass of errors and of superstitions had naturally extended itself during the long darkness of the Middle Age. Peoples and priests had each lent their hand. Out of the false traditions of Catholicism some new falsehood was seen to rise from time to time, and it is easy to mark in the history of the Church the date of all the great changes that Christianity has undergone. The most devoted defenders of the papal throne confess that the corruption was extreme at the outset of the sixteenth century. “Some years before the appearance of the Calvinist and Lutheran heresy,” says Bellarmine, “there existed scarcely any severity in the ecclesiastical laws, purity in manners, learning in sacred literature, respect for holy things, or religion.”[1]
Preaching, although very rare, contributed to thicken the darkness, it would seem, rather than to dispel it. Bossuet acknowledges this with precautions which but half conceal his thoughts: “Many preachers preached only indulgences, pilgrimages, alms to the religious orders, and made the essence of piety to consist in these practices, which were but its accessories. They did not speak so much as they should have done of the grace of Jesus Christ.”[2]
The Bible was silent beneath the dust of old libraries. It was kept in some places fastened with an iron chain; sad image of the interdiction with which it was stricken in the Catholic world.
After having forbidden it to the faithful, the clergy, by a very simple consequence, had closed the Bible in their own schools. A short while before the Reformation, the professors of Germany had been prohibited from explaining the Holy Word in their public and private lectures. The original tongues of the Old and New Testament were, so to say, suspected of heresy; and when Luther raised his voice, it would have been difficult to find in the church of Rome any doctors capable of discussing with him the text of the Scriptures.
In this deep silence of the sacred authors, ignorance, prejudice, ambition, avarice, had free speech. The priest frequently used this liberty not for the glory of God, but of himself; and religion, destined to transform man into the image of his Creator, ended by transforming the Creator himself into the image of cupidinous and intolerant man.
Theology, after having shone with a splendid light in the brilliant days of scholasticism, had by degrees lost its ardour as well as its authority, and had become an enormous collection of curious and frivolous questions. Incessantly occupied with sharpening in puerile disputes the point of its logic, it no longer answered the wants of the human mind any more than those of the human heart.
The masses of the people appeared to follow, in general, their accustomed way; but from habit and tradition, rather than from devotion. The enthusiasm of the Middle Age had evaporated, and it would have been vain to seek in the Church for those mighty inspirations, which caused all Europe to rise at the time of the crusades.
Some pious men dwelt in the presbyteries, in the cloisters, among the laity, striving to seize the truth through the veil with which it had been covered; but they were scattered, suspected, and cast down with grief.
Discipline had shared the alterations of doctrine. The pontiff of Rome having, under favour of the false Decretals, usurped the title and the functions of universal bishop, pretended to the exercise of most of the rights which belonged, in the first ages, to the heads of dioceses; and as he was not ubiquitous, as he was obedient to his passions or to his interests more than to his duties, he aggravated the abuses which he ought to have extirpated.
What the sovereign pontiff was to the bishops, the mendicant monks, the venders of indulgences, and the other vagabond agents of the Papacy, were to the simple curates and the parish priests. Regular and legitimate authority was compelled to give way to these intruders, who, while they promised to reinstate the flocks, did nothing but pervert them.
All was disorder and anarchy. A despotic power was at the summit of the Church; midway and below, were growing usurpations, scandalous and never-ceasing contests; Christianity had much less reason to complain of being too much governed, than of being badly governed. Illusory in the ranks of the clergy, discipline had actually become a source of demoralization for the laity. To the long and severe penances of ancient times had succeeded the redemption of sins at a money price. If, at least, it had been necessary to pay for each transgression separately, it would yet have been necessary to number one’s vices. The extreme evil was, that they might be redeemed all at once, they might be redeemed beforehand, for all one’s lifetime, for all one’s family, for all one’s posterity, for a whole parish altogether. Thenceforward, there was no more authority. The absolution of the priest was derided, because absolution had already been paid for out of the purse; and the clerical power that Rome maintained on one side, she overthrew on the other.
The traffic of indulgences was carried on by the same means as ordinary barter; it had its contractors on a large scale, its directors and sub-directors, its offices, its tariffs, its travelling factors. Indulgences were vended by auction, at the beat of the drum, in the public places. They were sold by wholesale and by retail, and those agents were employed, who best knew the art of deceiving and plundering mankind.
It was, above all, this sacrilegious industry which gave the fatal blow to the Romish church. Nothing irritates a people so much as to find in religion less morality than in themselves; and this instinct is just. Every religion should ameliorate those who believe in it. When it depraves them, when it makes them descend beneath that condition in which they would be without it, its fall is certain; for it possesses no longer its essential and supreme reason of existence.
How, moreover, could the members of the clergy enforce a respect for moral duties, which they were the first to transgress? We will not here recount the disgraceful and universal licentiousness so numerously attested by authentic declarations, among others by the hundred grievances which were presented to the diet of Nuremberg, in 1523, with the signature of a legate even of Pope Adrian. Many priests paid a public tax for the privilege of living in an unlawful commerce, and in many localities in Germany this disorder had been rendered obligatory, so that still greater offences might be avoided.
Besides indulgences, Rome had invented all kinds of methods for increasing its revenues: appellations, reservations, exemptions, provisions, dispensations, expectatives, annates. The gold of Europe would have been completely absorbed if the governments had not placed some barrier; and even the poorest nations were compelled to impoverish themselves yet more to gorge pontiffs, who, like the grave, never exclaimed—“It is enough.”
The bishops and the heads of monastic orders did the same in the different provinces of Catholicity. Everything helped them to swell the possessions of the Church; peace and war, public triumphs and misfortunes, private successes and reverses, the faith of these, and the heresy of those. What they could not obtain from the liberality of the faithful, they sought in the spoliation of those who disbelieved. And so, as the grievances of Nuremberg state, the regular and secular clergy possessed in Germany one-half the territory; in France it held the third; elsewhere, still more. And the ecclesiastical domains being exempt from all taxation, priests and monks, without bearing the burdens of the state, monopolized all its benefits.
Not only did they enjoy enormous privileges for their property; they had others for their persons. Every clerk was an anointed of the Lord, a sacred thing for the civil judge. No one had a right to place his hand upon him, until he had been tried, condemned, and degraded by the members of his own order. The clergy thus formed a society wholly distinct from the general society. It was a caste placed without and above the common law; its immunities prevailed over the sovereignty of justice, and authors entitled to our credence relate that wretches entered the sacerdotal order or the cloister, solely to commit crimes with impunity.
If the priests did not suffer the magistrates to attach them, they arrogated to themselves the right of interposing without end in the suits of the laity. Testaments and wills, marriages, the civil condition of children, and a host of other matters which were called mixed, were carried before their tribunal; so that a considerable part of justice depended upon the clergy, who themselves depended upon their peers and chief alone; an organization, useful perhaps in the times of ignorance, when none but ecclesiastics possessed any knowledge, but which, by perpetuating itself down to the sixteenth century, after the revival of letters, became the most iniquitous of prerogatives, the most intolerable of usurpations.
There are in the present day writers who draw a magnificent ideal of the state of Catholicism before Luther. But have they ever studied that epoch? And those who declaim with the greatest violence against the Reformation, would they suffer for one day the abuses it has destroyed?
And it must be said, for the honour of mankind, that from period to period, fresh and courageous adversaries have arisen against each error, and each encroachment of the priestly power. In an early age, Vigilantius, and Claude of Turin; then, the Vaudois and the Albigenses; then, the Wickliffites, the Hussites, and the Brethren of Moravia and Bohemia—small and feeble communities—were crushed by the popes leagued with the princes, but who from their scaffolds and their stakes, transmitted to each other the sacred flame of primitive faith, until, reared aloft by the powerful hand of Luther, it spread afar its rays over the Christian world.
Another protestation, parallel to the preceding, and which has been styled Catholic Protestantism, had constantly manifested itself in the bosom of the Church itself, particularly after the appearance of the mystics of the Middle Age. Among the theologians, Bernard de Clairvaux, Gerson d’Ailly, Nicholas de Clémangis; among the poets, Dante and Petrarch; even councils held at Pisa, Constance, and Basle; men the most renowned for their piety and their character, for their genius and their learning, had raised the same cry: “A reform, a reform in the Church! A reform in the head and the members, in the faith and the manners!” But this Catholic movement always failed; because it never attacked the root of the evil. The secret of obtaining all—is it not that of desiring and daring all?
Whilst the Papacy persecuted the former of these protestations, and tried to seduce the other, a new enemy presented itself: the most redoubtable of all, because it could assume the most diverse forms; because it displayed itself everywhere at the same moment; because neither artifices nor tortures could subdue it. And what was this antagonist?—The human mind itself awakening from its long sleep. The fifteenth century had restored to it the books of antiquity. It suddenly felt itself animated with an intense want of investigation and renewal; and resuming, at the same time, philosophy, history, poetry, the sciences, the arts, all the wonders of the most flourishing ages of Greece and ancient Rome, it was aware that it could and would march onward in its independence.
The discovery of printing came to help the revival of learning. The old world reappeared in its entirety at the same time that Christopher Columbus discovered a new one. More than three thousand writings were published from the year 1450 to the year 1520. There was a prodigious activity, which knew neither fatigue nor fear; and what could the Church oppose to this first expansion of the human mind, so happy and so proud of entering again upon the possession of itself? The martyrdom of Savonarola did not intimidate it; at the most it took a by-turn in the treatises of Pomponatius, to arrive at the same end. The Vatican, which had sometimes been so skilful, was not so in the face of this vast movement. Several popes succeeded each other, feeble, or covetous of money, or stained with the foulest crimes: Paul II., Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., Julius II. The last, Leo X., having the voluptuous tastes of the race of the Medici, to which he belonged, without sharing their grandeur or their courage,—a priest without theological learning, a pontiff without gravity, setting his buffoons to dispute about the immortality of the soul, and amusing himself with the frivolous diversions of the theatre, when Germany was on fire,—seems to have been chosen from on high to level the path of the Reformation.
Thus everything was ready. Scarcely do we place our foot upon the threshold of the sixteenth century, before we hear those hollow sounds which, in the moral world, as in the physical, announce the approach of the storm. The heart is oppressed, the mind is disturbed: something extraordinary, we know not what, is about to happen. Kings upon their thrones, the learned in their closets, professors in their chairs, pious men in their oratories, even warriors upon the field of battle, tremble and reveal, by brief words or acts of violence, the presentiments which pursue them.
In 1511, the emperor Maximilian and the king Louis XII. convoke a council at Pisa, in order to recall Julius II. to his duty, and to remedy the evils of the Church. Several cardinals attend, in spite of the prohibitions of the Vatican; and on the 21st of April, 1512, the pope Julius is suspended, as notoriously incorrigible and contumacious. “Arise, Cæsar,” write with one accord the members of this assembly to the emperor Maximilian: “Arise, be firm and watchful; the Church falls; the good are oppressed; and the wicked triumph.”
Julius II. opposed council with council, and assembled in the basilic of the Lateran the prelates who remained faithful to him. But even there, before this pontiff, who possessed no other knowledge than that of arms, Œgidius de Viterbo, general of the order of the Augustines, accuses the priests of having abandoned prayer for the sword, and of haunting, after battle, houses of prostitution. “Can we contemplate,” he asks, “without shedding tears of blood, the ignorance, the ambition, the immodesty, the impiety reigning in the holy places, whence they ought to be for ever banished?”
As they hearkened to these cries of distress descending from such high places, the troubled nations appealed to a new general council, as if experience had not taught them that these great assemblies, so prodigal of words, were barren for a work of reformation! But the multitude knew not whence deliverance might come, and, in its anxiety, it clung to the illusions of its old recollections.
In the midst of this universal and restless expectation, the enemy grew bold. Reuchlin maintained the rights of knowledge against the barbarous teaching of the universities. The noble Ulrich of Hutten, the representative of chivalry in this grand struggle, announced by appeals from the sword to public reason, the advent of a new civilization. Erasmus, the Voltaire of the epoch, excited the laughter of kings, lords, cardinals, and even the pope, at the expense of the monks and doctors, and opened the door by which the modern world must pass. Then Martin Luther appeared.
It is not part of my task to write the history of the Reformer. Sent to Rome respecting the affairs of the order of the Augustines, he found there a vast and profound incredulity, a revolting immorality. Luther returned to Germany heartbroken, his conscience agitated with bitter doubts. An old Bible, which he discovered in the convent of Erfurt, revealed to him a religion wholly different from that which he had been taught. Still the thought was not yet born within him to undertake the reformation of the Church. Pastor and professor at Wittenberg, he confined himself to spreading around him healthy doctrines and good examples.
But John Tetzel, a vender of indulgences, audacious to effrontery, covetous to cynicism, whilom condemned to prison for notorious crimes, and menaced with drowning in the Inn by the inhabitants of the Tyrol, dared to interpose his vile traffic between the word of Luther and the souls confided to him. Luther became indignant: he re-perused his Bible; and in 1517 he affixed to the door of the cathedral of Wittenberg those ninety-five theses destined soon to raise throughout all Europe such a formidable echo.
It was the revolt of his conscience, which made him seek in the Bible fresh weapons against the church of Rome. It is the same moral revolt, which will gather around him thousands, and soon millions of disciples. Luther has placed himself at the head of all the irritated people of worth.
To the dogma of justification by works, which has produced so many extravagant practices and shameful excesses, he opposes justification through faith in the redemption of Jesus Christ. All his doctrine is summed up in these words of the apostle Paul: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.”[3] This doctrine had the double advantage of resting for support upon Biblical texts, and of overthrowing by the same blow indulgences, supererogatory works of saints, pilgrimages, flagellations, penances, artificial merits. It thus accorded with the highest ideas, with the best religions, the intellectual and moral aspirations of the era.
Luther had taken a first step. He again appealed, nevertheless, from the pope ill-informed, to the pope better advised. But instead of an ordinance of reformation, Rome sent a bull of excommunication. The doctor of Wittenberg solemnly burnt it, with the Decretals of the Holy See, on the 10th of December, 1520, in the presence of innumerable spectators. The issuing flame lighted up all Europe, and cast a sinister glare upon the walls of the Vatican.
On the 17th of April, 1521, Luther appeared before the diet of Worms. He had against him the emperor and the pope, the two greatest powers of the universe; but he had for him the living forces of his age. When he was summoned to retract, he invoked the testimony of the Bible. If he were convicted of error by that, he would recant; if not, no! The envoy of Rome refused to open the book which condemned the papacy, and Charles V. began to perceive that there is here below something superior to the power of the sword.
The work advanced. It is interesting to observe that Luther did not arrive with a system complete and defined. He came with a first grievance against the abuses of the Romish church, then with a second; with one hand upsetting by degrees the old edifice of Catholicism, whilst with the other he constructed the new edifice; he did not himself apprehend the extent of his mission but as he gradually fulfilled it.
After the upraising of his conscience, came the reordering of doctrine; after doctrine, the reform of worship; after worship, the establishment of new ecclesiastical institutions. Luther never went beyond his convictions, or outstepped the movement of public opinion. It was thus that he retained under his standard those who had gathered around it, and that he was aided in his labour by the public thought. Luther gave much to the contemporaneous generation, and perhaps received yet more than he gave.
One of his most laborious and useful works was the translation of the Bible into German. It fixed the language of his country, and made stable its faith.
Eight years after the publication of the ninety-five theses, in 1525, Luther espoused Catherine de Bora, being persuaded, with Æneas Sylvius, who became pope under the name of Pius II., that if there are many strong reasons for interdicting priests from marrying, there are some much stronger for permitting it. In the performance of this solemn act, the Reformer equally avoided a precipitation which might have compromised his character, and a delay which might have degenerated or weakened his maxims. He was then forty-two years of age, and on the avowal of his opponents themselves, “he had spent all his youth without reproach, in continence.”[4]
In 1530, Melancthon, the fellow-labourer of Luther, presented to the diet of Augsburg, with his accord, the Confession of Faith, which, during ages, has served as a rallying-point to the Lutheran reformation. The Protestants showed in this way, that they had shaken off the yoke of Rome only to accept, without reservation, the injunctions of the Bible, such at least as they understood them according to the measure of the intelligence of their time.
There were manifest and sore trials in the life of Luther: the excesses of the Anabaptists, the insurrection of the peasants, the passions of the princes, who mingled with religious questions political calculations; the over-zeal of some of his followers, the weakness and timidity of many others. He was often grieved, never cast down; for the same spirit of faith which had opened to him the road, led him along it with unswerving constancy.
Luther died in 1546. Some hours before his end, he said: “Jonas, Cælius, and you who are present, pray for the cause of God and of his Gospel; for the council of Trent and the pope rage furiously.” And when the cold sweat seized him, he began to pray in these terms: “O my beloved Father in heaven, God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, God of all comfort, I thank thee that thou hast revealed to me thy dear Son Jesus Christ, in whom I believe, whom I have preached and confessed, whom I have loved and glorified. I pray thee, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on my poor soul.” Then he repeated thrice in Latin: “Father, I return my spirit into thy hands. Thou hast redeemed me, O Eternal God of truth.” Then, without agony, without effort, he breathed his last.
While the Reformation changed the face of Germany, it penetrated also into the mountains and the valleys of Switzerland. It had even appeared there before. Ulrich Zwinglius was encouraged and fortified by the words of Luther, but he had not waited for them. “I began to preach the Gospel in the year of grace 1516,” he wrote; “that is to say, when the name of Luther had not yet been pronounced in our country. It is not from Luther I have learned the doctrine of Christ; it is from the Word of God.”
Another seller of indulgences, Bernardine Samson, drove Zwinglius, in 1518, to declare himself openly. Ever, we see, the rebellion of conscience against the disorders of Catholic authority. The Reformation was a protestation of outraged morality, before it was a religious revival.
This unfrocked Carmelite had brought from Italy an impudence which provoked the indignation of vice itself. “I can pardon every sin,” he cried; “heaven and hell are submitted to my power, and I sell the favours of Jesus Christ to whomsoever will buy them for ready money.” He boasted of having carried off enormous sums from a poor country. When there was a lack of coin, he took in exchange for his papal bulls, plate of silver and gold. He made his acolytes shout to the multitude that pressed around his stalls: “Hinder not each other. Let those come first who have money; we will try afterwards to content those who have none.”
Ulrich Zwinglius, from that time, attacked the power of the pope, the penitential sacrament, the merit of ceremonial works, the sacrifice of the Mass, abstinence from flesh, the celibacy of priests; gradually growing more firm and more decided as the public voice answered his with increasing energy.
The Swiss Reformer was modest, affable, popular, and of irreproachable life. He had a profound knowledge of the Scriptures, a living faith, a solid erudition, clear ideas, a simple and precise language, an activity without limit. Stored with the Greek and Roman literature, and full of admiration for the great men of antiquity, he had some opinions which appeared novel and over-bold in his time. Zwinglius admitted, like many of the old fathers of the Church, the permanent and universal action of the divine spirit on humanity. “Plato,” said he, “also drank of the divine fountain: and if the two Catos, if Camillus and Scipio, had not been truly religious, would they have been so magnanimous?”[5]
Called to Zurich, he taught there, not what he had received from the Romish tradition, but what he had gathered from the Bible. “This is the preacher of truth,” said he to the magistrates; “it announces to you things as they are.” And from the year 1520, the council of Zurich published an ordinance, enjoining upon their ecclesiastics not to preach anything which was not found in the Holy Scriptures.
Three years after, Pope Adrian, seeing the growing authority of Zwinglius, endeavoured to gain him over. He sent him a letter, in which he complimented him upon his excellent virtues, and directed his legate to offer him everything short of the pontifical throne. Adrian knew the worth of the man, not his character. At the very moment when such high dignities were offered to him, Zwinglius was victoriously disputing at Zurich against the delegates of the bishop of Constance.
Other debates were commenced in the presence of the magistrates and of the people. At last, on the 12th of April, 1525, an ordinance for abolishing the Mass and celebrating the communion according to the simplicity of the Gospel appeared.
The difference of the age and manners should be noticed here. In the sixteenth century, the civil power decided upon the change of religion; in the nineteenth century this would be thought an intolerable usurpation. As civilization advances, it gradually diminishes, in spiritual matters, the authority of the state, and increases that of the individual.
The Helvetic cantons having taken different sides, some that of Rome, others that of the Reformation, a war of religion, the worst of all wars, broke out among them. It was an ancient custom for the chief pastor of Zurich to accompany the army. Zwinglius conformed to the practice. The historian Ruchat relates that he marched as if he were conducted to death, and that those who watched his demeanour observed that he ceased not to pray to God to guard in safe-keeping his soul and the church.
On the 11th of October, 1531, he was struck down on the battle-field of Cappel. He regained his feet, but, pressed by the crowd of fugitives, he thrice fell. “Alas, what misfortune is this?” he cried. “Well! they may kill the body, but they cannot slay the soul.” These were the last words he could articulate. Stretched upon his back, with joined hands, and eyes bent on heaven, the motion of his lips alone showed that he prayed. Some soldiers having lifted him up without knowing who he was, asked if he wished to confess, and invoke the Virgin and the saints. He indicated his dissent by a sign of the head, and upraising his eyes, continued his silent prayers. “It is an obstinate heretic!” shouted the soldiers, and an officer stabbing him in the throat with a pike, put an end to his existence. According to some, Ulrich Zwinglius was forty-four years of age; according to others, forty-seven.
Many different judgments have been passed upon this tragic end, and we may still see in them the change of opinions. Our times would, at least, deplore the death of a minister of the Gospel in the midst of a scene of carnage: such was not the manner of thinking three centuries ago. “Discharging the duties of his ministry in the army, Zwinglius,” says Theodore de Bèze, “was slain in battle, and his body was burnt by the enemy: God thus honouring his servant with a double crown, seeing that a man could not die after a more honourable and more holy fashion, than by losing this corruptible life for the safety of his country, and for the glory of God.”[6]
In spite of checks of more than one kind, the Reformation spread rapidly throughout a great part of Europe, and took root.
In Germany, Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg, the Palatinate, Pomerania, many secondary states, and nearly all the free towns; in the east, the majority of the population of Hungary; in the north, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and a part of Poland, burst asunder the chains of Roman Catholicism.
In England and Scotland, two distinct movements led the people to the Protestant faith: one guided by King Henry VIII., the other by the pastor John Knox. Hence, the diversity of principles and organization subsisting at the present day.
The Reformation penetrated into the heart of Europe, but could not establish itself. In Spain, the long struggle with the Moors had identified Catholicism with the national mind, and the Inquisition stood firm, supported by popular fanaticism. In Italy, the scepticism of the learned, the countless ramifications of the clergy, the interests of a multitude of families engaged in the maintenance of the old ecclesiastical order, the passion of the masses for the fine arts, and the pomp of the Romish worship, hindered the progress of Protestantism.
At the gates of France, Switzerland, on one side, with a few small bordering states, Alsace, Lorraine, the country of Montbéliard, which have since become French provinces; and on the other side, Flanders and Holland, listened with sympathy to the preaching of the new ideas. Thus the Reformation spread around all the frontiers of France, while it strove to penetrate and overrun it within.
We reach at length the history, which forms the subject of this book. It will place before our eyes great triumphs followed by great catastrophes, and fearful persecutions, only to be surpassed by the constancy of the victims. It is, altogether, one of the most important chapters in the annals of the French nation, and one of the most interesting pages of the Reformation.
HISTORY
OF THE
PROTESTANTS OF FRANCE.