MASSACRE AT VASSY.

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one fourth of the population, and more than three fourths of all the men of letters in the kingdom. Accordingly Montmorenci and Coligny are taken seemingly into high favor, and the Huguenots gain a good degree of toleration. Refugees come trooping back from England, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. A conference is called to meet at Poissy for the arrangement of religious differences, which results in an edict of toleration for the Huguenots, though under severe restrictions. In less than two months the edict is deliberately broken by the infamous massacre at Vassy. The Duke of Guise, upon entering the town on a Sunday morning, finds the Protestants assembling in a barn for religious worship, and directs his armed escort to break up the assembly. The poor people, mechanics and tradesmen for the most part, with their wives and children, try vainly to defend themselves by closing the doors; but they are no match for two or three hundred well-armed soldiery. The duke is struck by a flying missile, and in his rage orders his men to spare nobody; and a single hour sees more than forty wives made widows, sixty Huguenots slain outright and two hundred wounded, some of them mortally. Electric wires could scarcely have spread the tidings more swiftly throughout France. It was the signal for civil war.

Wherever the papists were in the majority other slaughters followed: at Paris, at Sens, at Rouen, and a score of other places. At Toulouse there was a monumental massacre of three thousand, which was commemorated by the Roman Catholics of that city in centennial festivals in 1662, in 1762, and which would have been commemorated in 1862 had it not been prohibited by the government of Napoleon III,1

1 Dr. T. M. Lindsay, Reformation, p. 84.

I cannot follow the scenes of the next ten years, through which Coligny stood the friend, and, so far as mortal arm could be, the defender of his hunted people: that bloody decree of Paris, by which with one stroke of the pen the entire Huguenot population of the kingdom were proscribed; Romanists commanded to arm in every parish, and at the tap of drum or stroke of bell to rise and slay their neighbors, without respect to age, or sex, or ties of family, without fear of being called to account, until, as it was said, fifty thousand were murdered; the plots for Coligny's assassination; his own proscription and outlawry; how his castle was dismantled, and his furniture, in eighty wagon-loads, carted to Paris and sold at public auction; his village burned; his escutcheon publicly broken to pieces; and his noble bearing under it all. The varying conditions of the churches and their leaders, under the caprices of Catherine, make too long and sad a story, up to the peace of St. Germain in 1570. Then came the bloody crisis, in which the red hand of Rome descended with the great destructive blow from which, to this day, the Protestantism of France has never recovered.

At the beginning of Charles's reign Catherine undertook to break the power of the Guises by allying herself with the Huguenots; but now she fears that the Huguenots themselves will abridge her influence, and plots for their destruction. The sole key to the woman's inconsistency is her ambition for personal power, which has been threatened first from one side, then from the other. The poor weak, dissolute king seems to have formed a strange liking for Coligny, in spite of his Huguenotism. The brutal mother sees a way through her son's fondness for accomplishing her cherished purposes. She will have the Huguenot lead

ST. BARTHOLOMEW.

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ers at court for a grand holiday, and through them deal the churches her fatal blow. Young Henry of Navarre will probably come to the throne of France, and he must marry into her family; the throne must not pass out of her control. Henry of Navarre is known as a Huguenot. What a bright thought, to wed him to her daughter, and have all the Huguenot leaders, high with hopes for the betterment of their condition, come to the wedding, and then give a signal for their slaughter, beginning with Coligny! A plot worthy of Catherine de Médicis,-worthy to crown the long series of bloody deeds which have made her family infamous from the days of Savonarola! That is the plan, and it is carried out to the letter. The wedding-day comes: the Huguenots are there, Coligny and all the rest. Some bungler tries to shoot him by stealth and fails, but it is only a short reprieve.

The dawn of St. Bartholomew breaks, August 24, 1572. The awful tolling of the bell is heard. The assassins begin. Coligny, first pierced with swordthrusts, is thrown to the pavement, unrecognizable. Guise, grim master of ceremonies, stoops and wipes the blood from the face of the murdered man to reassure himself that it is the corpse of his enemy, then kicks it, and leaves it to be beheaded by the mob, dragged headless through the streets of Paris, and finally hung by the heels upon the common gallows.

Then all through the sweet dawning light, and all that summer's day, and day after day, through Paris, through France, the work proceeds, as if cruelty ran on electric cords, till seventy thousand,1 of all ages, are

1 This is Sully's estimate; De Thou says twenty thousand; some authorities fix the number as high as one hundred thousand.

slain, — lusty manhood, and hoary hairs, babyhood at the breast, indiscriminately slaughtered, — until tigerish fury is wearied out, and earth, burdened with the dead, can bear no more.

And yet that church lived on; it lives to-day. It sent even across the sea a precious contribution to the faith and devotion of American liberty and American religion. To it and that long series of troubles which led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes we owe those names which shine like stars in the sky of our history: the Bowdoins, and Faneuils, and Boudinots; the Sigourneys, and Jays, and De Lanceys; the Pintards, and Bayards, and Grimkés, a cordon of brilliants, stretching, like the beacons of our eastern coast, from Cape Elizabeth to Florida. And that church is rising again. A grand idea is easy to start with Frenchmen, but hard to kill. France is one of those nations of which it is surely said, "The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever."

XI.

WILLIAM BREWSTER.

A. D. 1560-1644.

As on the first Christians in Antioch and in Rome, before churches existed there, the duty was incumbent of forming churches according to the mind of Christ, so on them in England, where Christ's institution had been subverted, and a different institution set up in its place, there was incumbent a duty of re-formation of churches. — DR. LEONARD BACON.