the noble
example the churches had set them. We are informed by a contemporary
record that the iconoclasts carefully abstained from trespassing, and
confined themselves to an exhibition of those passages of Sacred Writ in
which an idolatrous worship was prohibited. But, if the brief
argumentation for which the rapidity of the transaction allowed time was
not in all cases sufficient to produce entire conviction, it may be
presumed that any remaining scruples were removed by the contagion of
the popular enthusiasm. Montauban was purged of image-worship as in a
day, and without the injury of man, woman, or child.[1052]

[Sidenote: The Edict cannot be executed.]

[Sidenote: Impatience with "public idols."]

Coligny was right. The Edict of July could not be carried into execution
in those parts of France where, as in Montauban, the mass of the
population had openly adopted Protestantism. If the resistance
encountered was often accompanied by an earnestness that disdained to be
trammelled by the customary forms of civil law, it was almost always
exercised in accordance with the dictates of natural justice. If the
people, emancipated from the service of images, believed themselves to
possess an indisputable right to dash in pieces or burn the curiously
wrought saints sculptured in marble or portrayed by the painter's
pencil, this fact is less wonderful than that they scrupulously spared
the lives of the priests and monks to whose pecuniary advantage their
former worship had principally redounded. The plain Huguenot, like the
plain Christian in the primitive age, was fully persuaded that he had an
owner's title in the public idol, which not only justified him in
destroying it when he had discovered its vanity, but rendered it his
imperative duty to execute the natural impulse. As for the obligation of
nine-tenths of the population to use the idol tenderly, because of any
rightful claim of the remaining tithe, this was a consideration that
scarcely occurred to them.

[Sidenote: Calvin endeavors to repress it.]

Nor were they very solicitous respecting the dangers that might arise
from over-precipitancy. Not so with Calvin, from whose closely logical
intellect the influence of a thorough training in the principles of
French law had not been obliterated. Never was disapprobation more
clearly expressed than in the reformer's letter to the church of
Sauve--a small town in the Cevennes mountains, a score of miles from
Nismes--