Biassing the reader thus, he keeps back the real exterminating, destructive, and intolerant spirit of the Huguenots, and, while detailing here and there excesses, treats as insignificant the conspiracy of Amboise, Coligny's complicity in Poltrot's assassination of the Duke of Guise, Queen Jane's ruthless extirpation of Catholicity, the Michelade, and the fearful butchery enacted by Montgomery at Orthez, a small place where, nevertheless, the Catholic victims numbered, according to his own figures, three thousand, halt what he claims as the number of Protestant victims at Paris on the bloody day of St. Bartholomew.
Nor is he more happy in depicting the theories and ideas of the two parties.
Compare the Protestants in France with the early Christians and the difference will be seen. The Reformers everywhere were aggressive and intolerant. They did not ask merely liberty to adopt new religious views and practise them. They did, indeed, raise the cry of religious freedom—freedom of worship—freedom of conscience; but what did these words really mean? They meant the suppression of the Catholic worship, the extermination of the priesthood and religious orders, the pillage and defacing of Catholic churches, and the destruction of paintings, statues, relics, and crosses. When this was done, they proclaimed religious liberty. Thus, at Lyons, in 1562, "the Mass was abolished, liberty of conscience proclaimed," in two consecutive clauses.
The utter absurdity of such a connection does not strike Mr. White, nor will it strike many English readers as it does a Catholic ear. The Protestant spirit has so falsified ideas that we constantly hear the same inconsistency. The enthusiastic son of New England claims that the Puritan fathers established "freedom to worship God according to the dictates of conscience," when, in fact, they claimed only the right to worship for themselves and denied it to all others; the son of Rhode Island claims Roger Williams as the real founder of toleration, and yet his fanatical opposition to the slightest semblance to Catholicity was such that he exhorted the trained bands not to march under the English flag because it had the cross on it; the historian of New York, or the more elaborate historian of the Netherlands, will claim for Holland the honor of establishing religious freedom, and we read their pages with the impression that the people of the Netherlands were Protestant, as a unit; and that the republic established after throwing off the Spanish yoke made the land one where all creeds met in harmony, and all men were equal in the eye of the law in their religious rights. Yet what is the real fact? From that time till the present nearly one half of the people of the Netherlands have been Catholics. The Protestants, possessing a slight numerical advantage, ruled, and to the Catholics their rule was one of iron. They were deprived of all churches, prohibited from erecting others, confined to certain quarters, subjected to penal laws. Where then was the freedom of worship? In the reformers' minds these words had no application to Catholics.
Now, it was this aggressive, intolerant spirit of the reformers that made the civil governments in countries which elected to remain Catholic so severe on the new religionists. The moment a foreign emissary from Geneva gathered a few proselytes, enough to form a body of any size, then began coarse songs, ridiculing and scoffing at the holiest doctrines of the Catholics; then crosses would be broken down, crucifixes, statues of the blessed Virgin and the saints, defaced or destroyed; as their numbers grew, priests would be driven from their churches or shot down, and the edifices themselves plundered and appropriated to the new creed. That such things could be borne tamely was impossible. In France the government was weak and vacillating. The humbler and less instructed portions of the Catholic body retaliated in the same measure that they saw meted out, and resisted a creed that used abuse and violence, by abuse and violence. They had not the cant of their antagonists, but true religion is not to be measured by that standard.
Alarmed by the excesses of the Reformers elsewhere, the French government attempted to repress their entrance into France by penal laws, a course that seldom attains the end proposed. The progress of error was to be checked by more assiduous teaching of the people by their pastors, by zeal in reforming morals, by institutions practically exercising the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.
Yet, while conceding the general deficiency of power in penal laws to check the progress of religious opinions, it must be remembered that the destructive tenets we have alluded to made the increase of the Calvinists a danger to the peace and well-being of France. Beza, in his Profession of Faith, (v. Point p. 119,) advised the extermination of priests. Calvin (Apud Becan, t. v. opusc. 17, aph. 15, De modo propagandi Calvinismi) declares that the Jesuits must be killed or crushed by falsehood and calumny. The destruction of all representations of Christ and his saints was the constant theme of the reformed preachers, and under this war against idols, as they termed them, they included insult and outrage to the remains of those illustrious men of the past whose exalted virtues had endeared them to the Christian people.
From that day to this Protestantism has sanctioned the outrages thus advised and thus committed. The right of Protestants to demolish, on any slight pretext, Catholic churches, convents, shrines, monuments, or pictures, seems even now a sort of self-evident axiom, its exercise being regulated merely by grounds of expediency. England and the United States can show their examples of this, even in the present century; in the last, the outrages committed by New England troops in Canada and Acadia whenever a Catholic church fell into their power; the careful aiming of cannon at the monastic buildings in the siege of Quebec; the expedition against Louisburg, with the chaplain bearing an axe to demolish the idols; at once suggest themselves to the mind.
That Catholics possessed any right to their own churches, their own ideas of worship, was never entertained for a moment.