the longest time uncertain.  After half a century of civil wars and massacres it terminated in Henry IV., a Protestant king, who turned Catholic, but who gave Protestants the edict of Nantes; a precious, though insufficient and precarious pledge, which served France as a point of departure towards religious liberty, and which protected it for nearly a century, in the midst of the brilliant victory won by Catholicism. [The edict of Nantes, published by Henry IV. in 1598, was revoked by Louis XIV. in 1685.]

For more than three centuries civilized Europe has been discussing, pro or con, the question of religious liberty, but from instinct and with passion far more than with a serious understanding of what is at the bottom of things.  Even in our own day it is not without difficulty that a beginning is being made to understand and accept that principle in its true sense and in all its bearings.  Men were wonderfully far from it in 1560, at the accession of Charles IX., a child ten years old; they were entering, in blind confidence, upon a religious war, in order to arrive, only after four centuries of strife and misconception, at a vindication of religious liberty.  “Woe to thee, O country, that hast a child for king!” said, in accordance with the Bible, the Venetian Michael Suriano, ambassador to France at that time.  Around that royal child, and seeking to have the mastery over France by being masters over him, were struggling the three great parties at that time occupying the stage in the name of religion.  The Catholics rejected altogether the idea of religious liberty for the Protestants; the Protestants had absolute need of it, for it was their condition of existence; but they did not wish for it in the case of the Catholics, their adversaries.  The third party (tiers parti), as we call it nowadays, wished to hold the balance continually wavering between the Catholics and the Protestants, conceding to the former and the latter, alternately, that measure of liberty which was indispensable for most imperfect maintenance of the public peace, and reconcilable with the sovereign power of the kingship.  On such conditions was the government of Charles IX. to establish its existence.

The death of Francis II. put an end to a grand project of the Guises, which we do not find expressly indicated elsewhere than in the Memoires of Michael de Castelnau, one of the best informed and most intelligent historians of the time.  “Many Catholics,” says he, “were then of opinion that, if the authority of the Duke of Guise had continued to be armed with that of the king as it had been, the Protestants would have had enough to do.  For orders had been sent to all the principal lords of the kingdom, officers of the crown and knights of the order, to show themselves in the said city of Orleans on Christmas-day at the opening of the states, for that they might be all made to sign the confession of the Catholic faith in presence of the king and the chapter of the