the other
two are servants of the crown, dictate a _new_ edict, and wish that edict
to be absolutely irrevocable? There is no need of lugging the Roman
Catholic religion into the discussion, and undertaking its defence, for no
one has thought of attacking it. The demand made by the petitioners for a
compulsory subscription to certain articles of theirs is in opposition to
immemorial usage; for no subscription has ever been exacted save to the
creed of the Apostles. It is a second edict, and in truth nothing else
than the introduction of that hateful Spanish inquisition. Ten thousand
nobles and a hundred thousand soldiers will not be compelled either by
force or by authority to affix their signatures to it. But, to talk of
enforcing submission to a Roman Catholic confession is idle, so long as
the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine do not retract their own
adhesion to the Augsburg Confession lately given in with such
protestations to a German prince. The charge of countenancing the breaking
of images the prince would answer by pointing to the penalties he has
inflicted in order to repress the irregularity. And yet, if it come to the
true desert of punishment, what retribution ought not to be meted out for
the crimes perpetrated by the petitioners, or under their auspices and
after their examples, at Vassy, at Sens, at Paris, at Toulouse, and in so
many other places? For the author of the petition should have remembered
that it is nowhere written that a dead image ever cried for vengeance;
but the blood of man--God's living image--demands it of heaven, and draws
it down, though it tarry long. As for the accusation brought against Conde
and the best part of the French nobility, that they are rebels, the prince
hopes soon to meet his accusers in the open field and there decide the
question whether a foreigner and two others of such a station as they are
shall undertake to judge a prince of the blood. To allege Navarre's
authority comes with ill-grace from men who wronged that king so openly
during the late reign of Francis the Second. Finally, the Prince of Conde
would set over against the petition of the triumvirate, one of his own,
containing for its principal articles that the Edict of January, which his
enemies seek to overturn, shall be observed inviolate; that all the king's
subjects of every order and condition shall be maintained in their rights
and privileges; that the professors of the reformed faith shall b