ters of faith by the laity. At the same time the
council unconsciously revealed the necessity imposed on the private
Christian to investigate for himself the nature and grounds of his
belief, by strongly reprobating the disastrous custom of admitting into
sacred orders a host of illiterate, uncultivated persons of low
antecedents--beardless youths--and by confessing that this wretched
practice had justly excited the contempt of the world.[285]

[Sidenote: Financial help bought by persecution.]

Everywhere the clergy conceded the subsidy required by the exigencies of
the kingdom. But they left Francis in no doubt respecting the price of
their complaisance. This was nothing less than the extermination of the
new sect that had made its appearance in France. And the king
comprehended and fell in with the terms upon which the church agreed to
loosen its purse-strings. No doubtful policy must now prevail! No more
Berquins can be permitted to make their boast that they have been able,
protected by the king's panoply, to beard the lion in his den!

[Sidenote: Insult to an image.]

An incident occurring in Paris, before the adjournment of the Council of
Sens, gave Francis a specious excuse for inaugurating the more cruel
system of persecution now demanded of him, and tended somewhat to
conceal from the king himself, as well as from others, the mercenary
motive of the change. Just after the solemnities of Whitsunday, an
unheard of act of impiety startled the inhabitants of the capital, and
fully persuaded them that no object of their devotions was safe from
iconoclastic violence. One of those numerous statues of the Virgin Mary,
with the infant Jesus in her arms, that graced the streets of Paris, was
found to have been shockingly mutilated. The body had been pierced, and
the head-dress trampled under foot. The heads of the mother and child
had been broken off and ignominiously thrown in the rubbish.[286] A more
flagrant act of contempt for the religious sentiment of the country had
perhaps never been committed. The indignation it awakened must not be
judged by the standard of a calmer age.[287] In the desire to ascertain
the perpetrators of the outrage, the king offered a reward of a thousand
crowns. But no ingenuity could ferret them out. A vague rumor, indeed,
prevailed, that a similar excess had been witnessed in a village four or
five leagues distant, and that the culprits when detected had confessed
that they had been pro