o conscience."

The firm Christian principles of Philip of Mornay were now almost the
only barrier which stood in the way of the conversion of Henry. The
Catholic lords offered Mornay twenty thousand crowns of gold if he
would no more awaken the scruples of the king. Nobly he replied,

"The conscience of my master is not for sale, neither is mine."

Great efforts were then made to alienate Henry from his faithful
minister. Mornay by chance one day entered the cabinet of the king,
where his enemies were busy in their cabals. In the boldness of an
integrity which never gave him cause to blush, he thus addressed them
in the presence of the sovereign:

"It is hard, gentlemen, to prevent the king my master from speaking to
his faithful servant. The proposals which I offer the king are such
that I can pronounce them distinctly before you all. I propose to him
to serve God with a good conscience; to keep Him in view in every
action; to quiet the schism which is in his state by a holy
reformation of the Church, and to be an example for all Christendom
during all time to come. Are these things to be spoken in a corner? Do
you wish me to counsel him to go to mass? With what conscience shall I
advise if I do not first go myself? And what is religion, if it can be
laid aside like a shirt?"

The Catholic nobles felt the power of this moral courage and
integrity, and one of them, Marshal d'Aumont, yielding to a generous
impulse, exclaimed,

"You are better than we are, Monsieur Mornay; and if I said, two days
ago, that it was necessary to give you a pistol-shot in the head, I
say to-day entirely the contrary, and that you should have a statue."

Henry, however, was a politician, not a Christian; and nothing is more
amazing than the deaf ear which even apparently good men can turn to
the pleadings of conscience when they are involved in the mazes of
political ambition. The process of conversion was, for decency's sake,
protracted and ostentatious. As Henry probably had no fixed religious
principles, he could with perhaps as much truth say that he was a
Catholic as that he was a Protestant.

On the 23d of July the king listened to a public argument, five hours
in length, from the Archbishop of Bourges, upon the points of
essential difference between the two antagonistic creeds. Henry found
the reasoning of the archbishop most comfortably persuasive, and,
having separated himself for a time from Mornay, he professed to be
sole