What there was of religion was in hiding, perhaps, with the
so-called "Political" party, professedly almost indifferent to it,
but which had at least something of humanity on its side, and some
chance of that placidity of mind in which alone the business of the
spirit can be done. The new sect of "Papists" were not the true
catholics: there was little of the virtue of the martyr in militant
Calvinism. It is not a catholic historian who notes with profound
regret "that inauspicious day," in the year 1562, Gaston's tenth
year, "when the work of devastation began, which was to strip from
France that antique garniture of religious art which later ages have
not been able to replace." Axe and hammer at the carved work sounded
from one end of France to the other.
It was a peculiarity of this age of terror, that every one, including
Charles the Ninth himself, dreaded what the accident of war might
make, not merely of his enemies, but of temporary allies and
pretended friends, in an evenly balanced but very complex strife--of
merely personal rivals also, in some matter which had nothing to do
with the assumed motives of that strife.
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