they and I
humbly beseech you to employ our arms and our lives in
enterprises in which we can conscientiously engage. However
perilous they may be, we will willingly shed therein the
last drop of our blood."

Both of these noble-minded men soon after very suddenly and
mysteriously died. Few entertained a doubt that poison had been
administered by the order of Charles.

The _law_ of France required that these Protestants should be hunted
to death. This was _the law_ promulgated by the king and sent by his
own letters missive to the appointed officers of the crown.

But there is--_there is_ a HIGHER LAW than that of kings and courts.
Nobly these majestic men rendered to it their allegiance. They sealed
their fidelity to this HIGHER LAW with their blood. They were martyrs,
not fanatics.

On the third day of the massacre the king assembled the Parliament in
Paris, and made a public avowal of the part he had taken in this
fearful tragedy, and of the reasons which had influenced him to the
deed. Though he hoped to silence all Protestant tongues in his own
realms in death, he knew that the tale would be told throughout all
Europe. He therefore stated, in justification of the act, that he had,
"as if by a miracle," discovered that the Protestants were engaged in
a conspiracy against his own life and that of all of his family.

This charge, however, uttered for the moment, was speedily dropped and
forgotten. There was not the slightest evidence of such a design.

The Parliament, to give a little semblance of justice to the king's
accusation, sat in judgment upon the memory of the noble Coligni. They
sentenced him to be hung in effigy; ordered his arms to be dragged at
the heels of a horse through all the principal towns of France; his
magnificent castle of Chatillon to be razed to its foundations, and
never to be rebuilt; his fertile acres, in the culture of which he had
found his chief delight, to be desolated and sown with salt; his
portraits and statues, wherever found, to be destroyed; his children
to lose their title of nobility; all his goods and estates to be
confiscated to the use of the crown, and a monument of durable marble
to be raised, upon which this sentence of the court should be
engraved, to transmit to all posterity his alleged infamy. Thus was
punished on earth one of the noblest servants both of God and man. But
there is a day of final judgment yet to come. The oppressor has but
h