thousand reformed churches in France, and many great lords, at
first indifferent enough, adhered to the new doctrine.


5. Conflict between different religious beliefs--Impossibility
of Tolerance.


I have already stated that intolerance is always an accompaniment
of powerful religious beliefs. Political and religious
revolutions furnish us with numerous proofs of this fact, and
show us also that the mutual intolerance of sectaries of the same
religion is always much greater than that of the defenders
of remote and alien faiths, such as Islamism and Christianity.
In fact, if we consider the faiths for whose sake France was so
long rent asunder, we shall find that they did not differ on any
but accessory points. Catholics and Protestants adored exactly
the same God, and only differed in their manner of adoring Him.
If reason had played the smallest part in the elaboration of
their belief, it could easily have proved to them that it must be
quite indifferent to God whether He sees men adore Him in this
fashion or in that.

Reason being powerless to affect the brain of the convinced,
Protestants and Catholics continued their ferocious conflicts.
All the efforts of their sovereigns to reconcile them were in
vain. Catherine de Medicis, seeing the party of the Reformed
Church increasing day by day in spite of persecution, and
attracting a considerable number of nobles and magistrates,
thought to disarm them by convoking at Poissy, in 1561, an