strike a blow at the more tolerant
sentiments which had stolen into the breasts of the very judges of
parliament, its friends took a step that was at once indicative of its
progress and dictated by its necessities. A few days before Henry was
persuaded to call for a continuation of the discussion commenced at the
"Mercuriale"--on the twenty-sixth of May[710]--the first National Synod
of the French Protestants convened in the city of Paris. It was a small
assemblage in comparison with some others on the list of these national
councils extending down for about a century, and its sessions were held
with the utmost secrecy in a house in the Faubourg St. Germain. But it
performed for French Protestantism the two important services of giving
an authoritative statement of its system of doctrine, and of
establishing the principles of its form of government. The confession of
faith was full and explicit, as well on the points in which the
Protestant and the Roman churches agreed, as respecting the distinctive
tenets of the reformed. The "diabolical imaginations" of Servetus were
equally condemned with the gross abuses of monastic vows, pilgrimages,
celibacy, auricular confession, and indulgences. The pure observance of
the sacraments was established, as well against their corrupt and
superstitious use in the papal church, as against the "fantastic
sacramentarians" who rejected them entirely. Nor need we be surprised to
find the warrant of magistrates to interfere _in behalf_ of the truth
formally recognized. The right of the individual conscience was a right
for the most part ignored by thinking men on both sides during the
sixteenth century--covered and hidden by the fallacious application of
the principle of universal obligation to the inflexible law of right and
of God. The lesson of liberty based upon order was learned only in the
school of long and severe persecution. Even after thirty-seven or eight
years of violent suffering, the Protestant church of France admitted as
an article in her creed, that "God has placed the sword in the hand of
magistrates to repress the sins committed not only against the _second_
table of God's commandments, but also against the _first_!"[711]

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical discipline adopted.]

The "Ecclesiastical Discipline" laid the foundation of the organization
of the Protestants in France. Thoroughly democratic and representative
in its character, it instituted, or rather recognized, a cou