rson would outweigh in the arguments against
Catholicism whole libraries of faultless _catenas_, and a _consensus
patrum_ unbroken through fifteen centuries for the supremacy of St.
Peter.

There is no occasion to look for superstitious causes to explain the
phenomenon. The Catholic faith had ceased to be the faith of the large
mass of earnest thinking capable persons; and to those who can best do
the work, all work in this world sooner or later is committed. America
was the natural home for Protestants; persecuted at home, they sought a
place where they might worship God in their own way, without danger of
stake or gibbet, and the French Huguenots, as afterwards the English
Puritans, early found their way there. The fate of a party of Coligny's
people, who had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these
stories, illustrating, as it does in the highest degree, the wrath and
fury with which the passions on both sides were boiling. A certain John
Ribault, with about 400 companions, had emigrated to Florida. They were
quiet inoffensive people, and lived in peace there several years,
cultivating the soil, building villages, and on the best possible terms
with the natives. Spain was at the time at peace with France; we are,
therefore, to suppose that it was in pursuance of the great crusade, in
which they might feel secure of the secret, if not the confessed,
sympathy of the Guises, that a powerful Spanish fleet bore down upon
this settlement. The French made no resistance, and they were seized and
flayed alive, and their bodies hung out upon the trees, with an
inscription suspended over them, 'Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.' At
Paris all was sweetness and silence. The settlement was tranquilly
surrendered to the same men who had made it the scene of their atrocity;
and two years later, 500 of the very Spaniards who had been most active
in the murder were living there in peaceable possession, in two forts
which their relation with the natives had obliged them to build. It was
well that there were other Frenchmen living, of whose consciences the
Court had not the keeping, and who were able on emergencies to do what
was right without consulting it. A certain privateer, named Dominique de
Gourges, secretly armed and equipped a vessel at Rochelle, and, stealing
across the Atlantic and in two days collecting a strong party of
Indians, he came down suddenly upon the forts, and, taking them by
storm, slew or afterwards han