but who was ready to pour out his wealth like water, and to coin his
heart's blood, drop by drop, in this virtuous but almost desperate cause.
He felt that of a man to whom so much had been entrusted, much was to be
asked. God had endowed him with an incisive and comprehensive genius,
unfaltering fortitude, and with the rank and fortune which enable a man
to employ his faculties, to the injury or the happiness of his fellows,
on the widest scale. The Prince felt the responsibility, and the world
was to learn the result.

It was about this time that a deep change came over his mind. Hitherto,
although nominally attached to the communion of the ancient Church, his
course of life and habits of mind had not led him to deal very earnestly
with things beyond the world. The severe duties, the grave character of
the cause to which his days were henceforth to be devoted, had already
led him to a closer inspection of the essential attributes of
Christianity. He was now enrolled for life as a soldier of the
Reformation. The Reformation was henceforth his fatherland, the sphere,
of his duty and his affection. The religious Reformers became his
brethren, whether in France, Germany, the Netherlands, or England.
Yet his mind had taken a higher flight than that of the most eminent
Reformers. His goal was not a new doctrine, but religious liberty. In
an age when to think was a crime, and when bigotry and a persecuting
spirit characterized Romanists and Lutherans, Calvinists and Zwinglians,
he had dared to announce freedom of conscience as the great object for
which noble natures should strive. In an age when toleration was a vice,
he had the manhood to cultivate it as a virtue. His parting advice to
the Reformers of the Netherlands, when he left them for a season in the
spring of 1567, was to sink all lesser differences in religious union.
Those of the Augsburg Confession and those of the Calvinistic Church, in
their own opinion as incapable of commingling as oil and water, were, in