"It is hard, gentlemen, to prevent the king my master from speaking to his faithful servant. The proposals which I offer the king are such that I can pronounce them distinctly before you all. I propose to him to serve God with a good conscience; to keep Him in view in every action; to quiet the schism which is in his state by a holy reformation of the Church, and to be an example for all Christendom during all time to come. Are these things to be spoken in a corner? Do you wish me to counsel him to go to mass? With what conscience shall I advise if I do not first go myself? And what is religion, if it can be laid aside like a shirt?"
The Catholic nobles felt the power of this moral courage and integrity, and one of them, Marshal d'Aumont, yielding to a generous impulse, exclaimed,
"You are better than we are, Monsieur Mornay; and if I said, two days ago, that it was necessary to give you a pistol-shot in the head, I say to-day entirely the contrary, and that you should have a statue."
Indecision of Henry.
Henry, however, was a politician, not a Christian; and nothing is more amazing than the deaf ear which even apparently good men can turn to the pleadings of conscience when they are involved in the mazes of political ambition. The process of conversion was, for decency's sake, protracted and ostentatious. As Henry probably had no fixed religious principles, he could with perhaps as much truth say that he was a Catholic as that he was a Protestant.
Process of conversion.
On the 23d of July the king listened to a public argument, five hours in length, from the Archbishop of Bourges, upon the points of essential difference between the two antagonistic creeds. Henry found the reasoning of the archbishop most comfortably persuasive, and, having separated himself for a time from Mornay, he professed to be solemnly convinced that the Roman Catholic faith was the true religion. Those who knew Henry the best declare that he was sincere in the change, and his subsequent life seems certainly to indicate that he was so. The Duke of Sully, who refused to follow Henry into the Catholic Church, records,
Testimony of Sully.
"As uprightness and sincerity formed the depth of his heart, as they did of his words, I am persuaded that nothing would have been capable of making him embrace a religion which he internally despised, or of which he even doubted."