as caused the nations to shudder, throughout so large a portion of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will continue to repeat themselves at
intervals in various parts of the earth. Nothing can be more sublime
than the self-sacrifice, nothing more demoniac than the crimes, which
human creatures have seemed always ready to exhibit under the name of
religion.

It was and had been really civil war in France. In the Netherlands it
had become essentially a struggle for independence against a foreign
monarch; although the germ out of which both conflicts had grown to their
enormous proportions was an effort of the multitude to check the growth
of papacy. In France, accordingly, civil war, attended by that gaunt
sisterhood, murder, pestilence, and famine, had swept from the soil
almost everything that makes life valuable. It had not brought in its
train that extraordinary material prosperity and intellectual development
at which men wondered in the Netherlands, and to which allusion has just
been made. But a fortunate conjunction of circumstances had now placed
Henry of Navarre in a position of vantage. He represented the principle
of nationality, of French unity. It was impossible to deny that he was
in the regular line of succession, now that luckless Henry of Valois
slept with his fathers, and the principle of nationality might perhaps
prove as vital a force as attachment to the Roman Church. Moreover, the
adroit and unscrupulous Bearnese knew well how to shift the mantle of
religion from one shoulder to the other, to serve his purposes or the
humours of those whom he addressed.

"The King of Spain would exclude me from the kingdom and heritage of my
father because of my religion," he said to the Duke of Saxony; "but in
that religion I am determined to persist so long as I shall live." The
hand was the hand of Henry, but it was the voice of Duplessis Mornay.