d the Plantagenets. She is
adroit in adapting herself to circumstances, and, like her emblem the
fish, she changes her colour with that of the element in which she
swims. No doubt she has a strong position in this demand and will know
how to use it.

But I was surprised to hear even a Catholic bishop insist that his
Church had always paid so much respect to the rights of conscience. I
had been taught to believe that in the days of its power the Church had
not been particularly tender towards differences of opinion. Fire and
sword had been used freely enough as long as fire and sword were
available. I hinted my astonishment. The bishop said the Church had been
slandered; the Church had never in a single instance punished any man
merely for conscientious error. Protestants had falsified history.
Protestants read their histories, Catholics read theirs, and the
Catholic version was the true one. The separate governments of Europe
had no doubt been cruel. In France, Spain, the Low Countries, even in
England, heretics had been harshly dealt with, but it was the
governments that had burnt and massacred all those people, not the
Church. The governments were afraid of heresy because it led to
revolution. The Church had never shed any blood at all; the Church
could not, for she was forbidden to do so by her own canons. If she
found a man obstinate in unbelief, she cut him off from the communion
and handed him over to the secular arm. If the secular arm thought fit
to kill him, the Church's hands were clear of it.

[Illustration: PORT AU PRINCE, HAYTI.]

So Pilate washed his hands; so the judge might say he never hanged a
murderer; the execution was the work of the hangman. The bishop defied
me to produce an instance in which in Rome, when the temporal power was
with the pope and the civil magistrates were churchmen, there had ever
been an execution for heresy. I mentioned Giordano Bruno, whom the
bishop had forgotten; but we agreed not to quarrel, and I could not
admire sufficiently the hardihood and the ingenuity of his argument. The
English bishops and abbots passed through parliament the Act _de
haeretico comburendo_, but they were acting as politicians, not as
churchmen. The Spanish Inquisition burnt freely and successfully. The
inquisitors were archbishops and bishops, but the Holy Office was a
function of the State. When Gregory XIII. struck his medal in
commemoration of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he was then only t