1829.] The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. 453 
pable, and the connexion with the popedom is established by every 
evidence that can bring conviction to the mind of man; the massacre of 
the protestant princes and gentlemen in Paris, in the memorable 
year 1572. 
The design of this comprehensive butchery seems to have directly 
originated with the court of Rome. Only three years before the 
massacre, Pius the Vth, despairing of the extinction of the protestants 
by open arms, darkly suggested a way more secret and more sure. 
“ Our zeal,” said his letter to the Cardinal of Lorrain, “ gives us the 
right of earnestly exhorting and exciting you to use all your influence 
for procuring a definitive and serious adoption of the measure most 
proper for bringing about the destruction of the implacable enemies of 
God and the king.” A letter to Charles the [Xth, written soon after,* 
is not less explicit. “ We pray God to grant your majesty the victory 
over our common enemies. When God, as we trust, shall have given 
us the victory, it will then be for you to punish with the utmost rigour 
the heretics and their leaders, because they are the enemies of God ; 
you must avenge upon them not only your own injuries, but also 
those of Almighty God.” + 
The battle of Jarnac was fought, and the Protestants suffered a defeat. 
The Pope could not restrain his exultation at this prospect of ruin to the 
“heretics,” and he laboured to stimulate the fierce spirit of the French 
court to immediate and remorseless massacre. 
“The more,” said this atrocious manifesto, “ the Lord has treated 
you and me with kindness, the more you ought to take advantage of the 
opportunity which this victory offers to you, for pursuing and destroying 
all the enemies that still remain ; for tearing up entirely all the roots, and 
even the smallest fibres of the reots, of so terrible and confirmed an evil. 
For unless they are radically extirpated, they will be found to shoot out 
again ; and as it has already happened several times, the mischief will re- 
appear, when your majesty least expects it. You will bring this about, 
if no consideration for persons, or worldly things, induces you to spare the 
enemies of God, who have never spared God; who have never spared 
yourself. For you will not succeed in turning away the wrath of God, 
except by avenging him rigorously on the wretches who have offended 
him ; by inflicting on them the punishment they deserve.” 
The Pope did not neglect a person of so much influence as the queen 
mother ; but, as if he knew her wolfish spirit, he writes to her in the still 
plainer terms, of promising the assistance of Heaven, if she pursue the 
enemies of the Catholic religion, “ till they are all massacred ; for it is 
only by the entire extermination of the heretics, that the Catholic worship 
can be restored.” In another letter he tells her, that having heard it 
stated, “ that some persons were exerting themselves to save a small 
number of the prisoners, he warned her to be careful that no such thing 
should be done; and adjured her to neglect no means that these abo- 
minable men should suffer the punishment they deserved.” 
Those letters are undenied; they are public documents of French 
history ; and what can be more hideously sanguinary than their spirit ! 
We are to remember, too, that they are the commands of one who holds 
the supreme rank in spiritual things over the minds of papists, that he is 
to them infallible, “the vicar of God, a God on earth.” We cannot 
—_—----—--—---- 
* 13th of January 1569. | + 6th of March 1569, 
