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Roman Martyrology, The, 430. Rural Poems, 573. Report of New York University, 575. Robertson's Lectures on Burke, 717.

Symbolism, by Moehler, 285. Sunday-School Library, Illustrated, 286. Shiel's Sketches of the Irish Bar, 287. Sydnie Adriance, 430. South America, A Thousand Miles across, 431. Synodus Dioecesana Baltimorensis, 432. St. John's Knowledge and Love of God, 573. Sadlier's Almanac, 718.

The Works of Burns, Scott, Milton, etc., 142. The Lily of the Valley, 287. The Bird, 425. Tablets, 426. The Two Women, 432. Taine's Ideal of Art, 572. The Little Gipsy, 574. Tobacco and Alcohol, 719. The Conscript, 859.

The Catholic World.

The Massacre Of St. Bartholomew--its Origin And Character.

Few historical events have been more persistently used in arguments against the Catholic Church than the massacre of Admiral Coligny, and a great number of Protestant nobles and people, at Paris, on St. Bartholomew's day, 1572, by orders emanating from the court.

Isolated from the religious wars in which it is but one of the darkest episodes, this affair has been set forward as an independent act--a deliberate scheme of the Catholic party in France--king, nobles, and clergy--to extinguish Protestantism at a single blow. The numbers of the victims have been exaggerated to an extent incompatible with all contemporary statistics of population; and the massacre of St. Bartholomew has thus been transmitted, as if by a series of distorting mirrors, from the pamphlets of the time to the histories, sermons, periodicals, and school-books of our days, each reflection but a distortion of the last, and so exceeding it in unreality that at length truth had become utterly hopeless.

In fact, we might as well expect to have Bibles throw out the long-sanctioned misprint of "strain at a gnat," and print, correctly, "strain out a gnat," or omit the intrusive words at the end of the Lord's Prayer, which all Protestant Biblical scholars admit to be spurious, as to expect popular accounts of St. Bartholomew's day to come down to what is really certain and authentic.

Even among writers of a higher stamp, there seemed to be a disposition to avoid research that would break the charm. Historical scholars made little effort to free the subject from the mists and fables with which it has been encompassed, and set down only well-attested facts with authorities to sustain them. It is, therefore, with no less surprise than gratification that we find in the recent work of Henry White a laborious and thorough examination of the evidence still extant as to the originators of the dark deed, their motives and object, the extent of the slaughter, and the reasons assigned at the moment and subsequently. It is one of those subjects in which no work will be accepted entirely by readers of an opposite faith, inasmuch as it is almost impossible to avoid drawing inferences, and ascribing motives for acts, to real or supposed modes of thought in the religious body to which the actors belonged.

Such is White's statement of the position of the question; and his work has been justly styled "able and unpretentious."

In France, the anti-Christian writers of the last century--Voltaire and his school--were all loud in denunciation of the affair, and painted it in its worst colors. It was too good a weapon, in their war against religion, to be easily laid down; and it was made to do such good service that later Catholic apologists have till recently scarcely ventured on any examination of the question that would seem at all favorable. The discussion by Gandy is, in extent and research, as well as in soundness of principle, by far the best review of the subject. Yet, as a close historical argument, the force is sometimes destroyed by the citation of comparatively weak and undecisive authorities.

In English, the best Catholic tract on St. Bartholomew was that of Dr. Lingard.

Some of his positions were not well taken, and do not stand when confronted with authorities brought forward by later research. Yet his essay compelled a real historic investigation by subsequent writers, and has led, indirectly at least, to the work of Mr. White.

This writer says, not inaptly : "It is easy to prove any historical untruth by a skilful manipulation of documents." This skilful manipulation need not be done with the consciousness of guilt. It may be the result of prejudice, party spirit, bias; and he himself is not free from objection. With an evident endeavor to be impartial, his education and prejudices lead him to slur over some acts and expatiate on others; to ascribe to exalted piety all the deeds of one party, and deny to the other any real religious feeling.

This taints all his introductory chapters on the religious wars in France, prior to 1572, giving a false light and color to the whole. It gives the impression that real piety, devotion, religious feeling, were not to be found at all among the Catholics of France, but were the peculiar attributes of the disciples gained by the emissaries sent from Geneva by Calvin.

Biassing the reader thus, he keeps back the real exterminating, destructive, and intolerant spirit of the Huguenots, and, while detailing here and there excesses, treats as insignificant the conspiracy of Amboise, Coligny's complicity in Poltrot's assassination of the Duke of Guise, Queen Jane's ruthless extirpation of Catholicity, the Michelade, and the fearful butchery enacted by Montgomery at Orthez, a small place where, nevertheless, the Catholic victims numbered, according to his own figures, three thousand, halt what he claims as the number of Protestant victims at Paris on the bloody day of St. Bartholomew.

Nor is he more happy in depicting the theories and ideas of the two parties.

Compare the Protestants in France with the early Christians and the difference will be seen. The Reformers everywhere were aggressive and intolerant. They did not ask merely liberty to adopt new religious views and practise them. They did, indeed, raise the cry of religious freedom--freedom of worship--freedom of conscience; but what did these words really mean? They meant the suppression of the Catholic worship, the extermination of the priesthood and religious orders, the pillage and defacing of Catholic churches, and the destruction of paintings, statues, relics, and crosses. When this was done, they proclaimed religious liberty. Thus, at Lyons, in 1562, "the Mass was abolished, liberty of conscience proclaimed," in two consecutive clauses.

The utter absurdity of such a connection does not strike Mr. White, nor will it strike many English readers as it does a Catholic ear. The Protestant spirit has so falsified ideas that we constantly hear the same inconsistency. The enthusiastic son of New England claims that the Puritan fathers established "freedom to worship God according to the dictates of conscience," when, in fact, they claimed only the right to worship for themselves and denied it to all others; the son of Rhode Island claims Roger Williams as the real founder of toleration, and yet his fanatical opposition to the slightest semblance to Catholicity was such that he exhorted the trained bands not to march under the English flag because it had the cross on it; the historian of New York, or the more elaborate historian of the Netherlands, will claim for Holland the honor of establishing religious freedom, and we read their pages with the impression that the people of the Netherlands were Protestant, as a unit; and that the republic established after throwing off the Spanish yoke made the land one where all creeds met in harmony, and all men were equal in the eye of the law in their religious rights. Yet what is the real fact? From that time till the present nearly one half of the people of the Netherlands have been Catholics. The Protestants, possessing a slight numerical advantage, ruled, and to the Catholics their rule was one of iron. They were deprived of all churches, prohibited from erecting others, confined to certain quarters, subjected to penal laws. Where then was the freedom of worship? In the reformers' minds these words had no application to Catholics.

Now, it was this aggressive, intolerant spirit of the reformers that made the civil governments in countries which elected to remain Catholic so severe on the new religionists. The moment a foreign emissary from Geneva gathered a few proselytes, enough to form a body of any size, then began coarse songs, ridiculing and scoffing at the holiest doctrines of the Catholics; then crosses would be broken down, crucifixes, statues of the blessed Virgin and the saints, defaced or destroyed; as their numbers grew, priests would be driven from their churches or shot down, and the edifices themselves plundered and appropriated to the new creed. That such things could be borne tamely was impossible. In France the government was weak and vacillating. The humbler and less instructed portions of the Catholic body retaliated in the same measure that they saw meted out, and resisted a creed that used abuse and violence, by abuse and violence. They had not the cant of their antagonists, but true religion is not to be measured by that standard.

Alarmed by the excesses of the Reformers elsewhere, the French government attempted to repress their entrance into France by penal laws, a course that seldom attains the end proposed. The progress of error was to be checked by more assiduous teaching of the people by their pastors, by zeal in reforming morals, by institutions practically exercising the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.

That Catholics possessed any right to their own churches, their own ideas of worship, was never entertained for a moment.

The civil law might justly repress such men, if not on the simple ground of teaching false doctrines, at least for their claim of right to destroy the liberty of those who professed the religion of their ancestors.

The position of affairs in France justified the hopes of the reformers. There were three parties in the state--the earnest Catholic party, headed by the Guises of Lorraine; the Huguenot party, directed by Calvin, with Cond? in France as its future king, and Coligny as its master-spirit; and, as usual in such cases, a third party of weak men, who hampered the Catholics, and thus strengthened their opponents, by hesitation, uncertainty, and fitfulness.

The queen mother, Catharine de Medicis, disliked the house of Lorraine more than she loved Catholicity; and, jealous of the growing power of the Guises, was not disinclined to see the party of Cond? counterbalance it. Hence, she generally threw her influence into the third party, in which figured the Duke d'Alen?on, the Montmorencies, Coss?, Biron, and to which men like the famous Chancellor l'Hopital gave their influence. How little the true Catholic spirit, as we understand it now, prevailed among the higher nobility, may be inferred from the fact that the two great Protestant leaders, Cond? and Coligny, were brothers of cardinals, their close relationship to princes of the Roman Church exerting no influence. One of these cardinals apostatized, and, after defying the pope, fled to England, to be poisoned by his valet; the other was a mere figure in the stirring scenes and times in which he lived.

Encouraged by the edict of January, 1560, the masses of the reformed party were, everywhere that their numbers permitted it, seizing Catholic churches and monasteries, expelling the inmates, demolishing every vestige of the ancient faith. While they were thus committing themselves, and overawing the Catholics, the leaders formed the celebrated plot of Amboise to assassinate the Guises, seize the person of the king, and, of course, the control of the government. In spite of his disavowal, made after it had failed, Calvin really approved of it at first. This White denies, but the letter to Sturm, cited by Gandy, is decisive; and in the very letter where he seems to condemn his followers, he says: "Had they not been opposed, in time our people would have seized many churches; ... but there, too, they yielded with the same weakness." Coligny's complicity is as evident. The ostensible leader was Bary de la Renaudie, "whose enmity to Guise," says White, "probably made him renounce his religion and join the reformers."

Protestant writers all admit that the plot of Amboise would, if successful, have overthrown Catholicity for ever in France. The Guises saw the danger to themselves, to Catholicity, and to royalty, and acted with promptness and energy. Every road and avenue leading to the place was guarded, and the separate bands of the conspirators as they came up were met and crushed, la Renaudie, the ostensible leader, being slain.

Then followed a series of terrible criminal proceedings. The partisans of the rebellion were tried, condemned, and executed with as little mercy as English rulers ever manifested to Irish rebels. White puts the number executed at one thousand two hundred, but cites no authorities to justify so large an estimate.

Still, under Catharine's fickle favor, the Huguenots were steadily gaining ground, and the Colloquy at Poissy, in 1562, where Beza appeared in person, was, in its actual result and in moral effect, a victory to the reformers. The countenance of the court gave them boldness. The Catholic party saw the evident danger and were loud in their complaints, but this only made collisions more frequent: one party elate with hope and triumph, the other seeing naught but treachery and violence.

It needed but a spark to kindle a conflagration; at last it came. On Corpus Christi, in 1561, as the procession of the blessed sacrament moved through the streets of Lyons, a Huguenot rushed upon the officiating clergyman and endeavored to wrest the consecrated host from his hands. So daring an outrage roused the Catholics to fury. In an instant the whole city was in arms, and the innocent atoned in blood for the madness of one. Even in Paris itself similar riots took place, and fifty Catholics were killed or wounded at the church of St. Medard, into which D'Andelot rode on horseback at the head of the Huguenots.

The measure, however, failed to produce tranquillity. The Huguenots, far from restoring what they had seized, continued their acts of violence. At Nismes the churches and convents were attacked and profaned, while in Gascony and Languedoc the reformers had established such a reign of terror that for forty leagues around no Catholic priest durst show himself. Montpellier, Montauban, and Castres beheld similar profanations of churches.

Coligny, a prototype of Cromwell in apparent fanaticism, in military skill, in relentless cruelty toward the Catholic clergy, like the Puritan leader of the next century, looked beyond the Atlantic. He had projected a Protestant colony of refuge in Brazil; its failure did not prevent his renewing the attempt in Florida. In the month following that in which the edict was issued, he despatched John Ribaut to lay the foundation of a French colony in America. He seems to have been planning a retreat against sudden disaster in the war they were rapidly preparing. The fate of that colony is well known. At Vassy, in March, a Huguenot congregation came into collision with the Duke of Guise; accounts differ widely as to the details. The duke asserted that his men were attacked. On being struck in the face with a stone, he cried to his men to show no quarter, and, according to White, fifty or sixty were killed and two hundred wounded.

In a moment the affair was taken up and echoed through France. It was worth an army to the cause of rebellion. The military churches rose. So complete was their organization that almost simultaneously thirty-five cities were taken, the Cevennes, the Vivarrais, and the Comt? Venaissin were in revolt. Everywhere the Catholic worship was suppressed, the churches stripped, the clergy banished, while the riches torn from the shrines and altars enabled them to maintain the war.

The shrine of St. Martin of Tours, venerated and enriched by the piety of France during a thousand years, gave Cond?, prince of the blood, a million two thousand livres to devastate France. To add to their strength, the Huguenots then formed the treaty of Hampton Court with Elizabeth, and by it agreed to restore Calais to England.

As we have seen, they took Lyons, and, after massacring priests and religious, abolished the Mass, and with the same breath declared that every one should be free in his religion. As the Catholics were unprepared, city after city fell into their hands, till no less than two hundred were swept by these devastating hordes, fiercer than Goth or Vandal. The history of every French city marks at this epoch the destruction of all that the past had revered. Orleans, Mans, Troyes, Tours, Bayeux, all repeat the same story. Everywhere priests, religious of both sexes, Catholic laity, were butchered and mutilated with every barbarity. The Baron des Adrets stands forth as the terrible butcher of this period, who made his barbarity a sport, and trained the mind of France to savage inhumanity. In the little town of Montbrison, in August, 1562, he slaughtered more than eight hundred men, women, and children.

The recent French historian, Martin, whose work is in process of publication in this country, glosses over this period by merely alluding to the profanation and pillage of the Catholic churches and religious houses. Every local history in France, however, attests the slaughter and mutilation of the clergy, the last infamy always popularly ascribed to the order of Coligny. Beza, writing in January, 1562, admits that the Protestants of Aquitaine, though enjoying full religious liberty, massacred priests and wished to exterminate their enemies.

This sudden rebellion was the work of Coligny, who, with his army of religious enthusiasts, and "all the restless, factious, and discontented, who linked their fortunes to a party whose triumph would involve confiscation of the wealth of the church," with German mercenaries and English plunderers, swept through the land with prayer on his lips and treason in his heart.

Negotiation failing, the royal troops began the campaign to recover the conquered cities. Blois, Tours, Poitiers, Angers, Bourges, and Rouen were at once retaken, and Orleans, the stronghold of reform, besieged. In the battle of Dreux, fought on the 19th of December, the rebels were utterly defeated, Cond? remaining a prisoner in the hands of the royal forces.

While besieging Orleans, Guise was assassinated by Jean M?r? de Poltrot, a man whom Coligny aided with money, and who had revealed to that nobleman his project of murder. White's endeavor to exculpate Coligny is very lame. He deems it suspicious that Poltrot was executed at once without his being confronted with Coligny; as though the rebel general would have come into court for the purpose, in the very heat of the civil war. He finally, however, admits: "This leaves no doubt that Coligny assented, if he did not consent, to the crime. He was not unwilling to profit by it, though he would do nothing to further it. This may diminish the lofty moral pedestal on which some writers have placed the Protestant hero; but he was a man, and had all a man's failings, though he may have controlled them by his religious principles. Nor was assassination considered at all cowardly or disgraceful in those days; not more so than killing a man in a duel was, until very recently, among us."

As he knew the project and gave money, it is hard to see how "he would do nothing to further it." That he had all a man's failings is a very loose form of speech; so loose and broad that, if assassination was not then deemed cowardly or disgraceful, the subsequent killing of Coligny himself, "a man with all a man's failings," can scarcely be deemed cowardly or disgraceful. In fact, at the time, the Protestant party openly defended the murder of Guise, and Beza, not exempt himself from suspicion of complicity, "conferred on Poltrot the martyr's crown."

The Catholic party, thus deprived of its best military leader, again inclined to peace. A negotiation, opened through Cond?, resulted in the pacification of Amboise, March 19th, 1563. This gave each man liberty to profess the religion of his choice in his own domicile, but restricted public worship of the Protestants more than the edict of January had done.

The conference at Bayonne between the French and Spanish courts has often been represented as a plot for the utter extermination of the Huguenots. White shows that it was but a series of festivities; and though the troubles were spoken of, neither court counselled violent measures. Even Alva went no further than suggesting the seizure of the most turbulent leaders.

Charles himself, favorable at Bayonne, became embittered against the reformers, as White himself states, by what he saw as he returned through the states of the Queen of Navarre, who had, with relentless fury, extirpated Catholicity from her territory.

The pacification could not restore peace to the excited public mind while the two antagonistic parties stood face to face. The favor shown to Cond? after he joined in expelling his English allies from Havre, as well as to Coligny, whom Montmorency summoned to garrison Paris, emboldened the reformers. The remaining Catholic churches began to undergo the terrible profanation that visited so many, and with this came retaliation. The Protestant princes in Germany at this time appealed to Charles to show lenity to their fellow-believers in his kingdom. The French monarch rebuked their intermeddling, and added, "I might also pray them to permit the Catholics to worship freely in their own cities." And White admits that the Catholics there fared no better than the Huguenots in France.

As before, the Catholics were without union or plan, while the Huguenots were an organized body of secret conspirators, acting on a well-concerted plan.

The military operations continued until Catharine visited the Huguenot camp, and effected the treaty of Longjumeau, But this peace was as hollow as the rest. White charges that the Catholics put numbers of Protestants to death. The Huguenots certainly continued their destruction of Catholic churches. "Brequemant, one of their leaders," says White, "cheered them on to murder, wearing a string of priests' ears around his neck."

At last the Catholics saw the necessity of organizing, and in June, 1568, a Christian and Royal League was formed at Champagne, "to maintain the Catholic Church in France, and preserve the crown in the house of Valois, so long as it shall govern according to the Catholic and Apostolic religion."

The Catholics did not act too soon. The Huguenots were again ripe for action. The leaders retired to Rochelle, and France was again in arms. Elizabeth sent to Rochelle men, arms, and money; the Prince of Orange also promised aid.

The first great battle was fought at Jarnac, March 13th, 1569, where Cond? was defeated and killed. Andelot died soon after, in May, and Duke Wolfgang, of Deux Ponts, who brought fourteen thousand Germans to swell the Huguenot ranks, soon followed. Coligny gained some advantage in the action at Roche Abeille, showing terrible cruelty to the prisoners; but in the battle of Moncontour his army of eighteen thousand was scattered to the winds, scarcely a thousand being left around him. Then cries for quarter were met by shouts of "Remember Roche Abeille!"

Retreating, Coligny was joined by Montgomery, fresh from that terrible massacre of Orthez, before which St. Bartholomew itself pales, three thousand Catholics having been butchered, without regard to age or sex, and the river Gave being actually dammed up by the bodies of the Catholics. The indecisive action of Arnay le Due led to negotiations resulting in the treaty of St. Germain, August, 1570.

These treaties are differently viewed. The proposal for them always came from the court, and followed every victory gained by the Catholic party. White would make them out to be traps laid by Catharine; Gandy seems to lean to the same solution in attributing them to her, though he makes her object to have been to prevent the Guises from being complete masters.

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