that there are no people more wicked
and criminal that heretics; generally, as long as they are a prey to the
blazing fagots, the people around them are excited to frenzy and curse
them in the midst of their torments." The sixteenth century is that
period of French history at which this intellectual and moral blindness
cost France "Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men's hands,"--
most dear; it supplied the bad passions of men with a means, of which
they amply availed themselves, of gratifying then without scruple and
without remorse. If, in the early part of this century, the Reformation
was as yet without great leaders, it was not, nevertheless, amongst only
the laborers, the humble and the poor, that it found confessors and
martyrs. The provincial nobility, the burgesses of the towns, the
magistracy, the bar, the industrial classes as well as the learned, even
then furnished their quota of devoted and faithful friends. A nobleman,
a Picard by birth, born about 1490 at Passy, near Paris, where he
generally lived, Louis de Berquin by name, was one of the most
distinguished of them by his social position, his elevated ideas,
his learning, the purity of his morals, and the dignity of his life.
Possessed of a patrimonial estate, near Abbeville, which brought him in a
modest income of six hundred crowns a year, and a bachelor, he devoted
himself to study and to religious matters with independence of mind and
with a pious heart. "Most faithfully observant," says Erasmus, "of the
ordinances and rites of the church, to wit, prescribed fasts, holy days,
forbidden meats, masses, sermons, and, in a word, all, that tends to
piety, he strongly reprobated the doctrines of Luther." He was none the
less, in 1523, denounced to the Parliament of Paris as being on the side
of the Reformers. He had books, it was said; he even composed them
himself on questions of faith, and he had been engaged in some sort of
dispute with the theologian William de Coutance, head of Harcourt
College.

[Illustration: Erasmus----194]

The attorney-general of the Parliament ordered one of his officers to go
and make an examination of Berquin's books as well as papers, and to
seize what appeared to him to savor of heresy. The officer brought away
divers works of Luther, Melancthon, and Carlostadt, and some original
treatises of Berquin himself, which were deposited in the keeping of the
court. The theological faculty claimed to examine th