nitiative of a prince who might differ in religion from all his
subjects. The extermination of obstinate Catholics was a matter of
course; Melanchthon insisted that the Anabaptists should be put to
death, and Beza was of opinion that Anti-Trinitarians ought to be
executed, even after recantation. But no Lutheran could complain when
the secular arm converted him into a Calvinist. "Your conscience is in
error," he would say, "but under the circumstances you are not only
justified, but compelled, on my own principles, to act as you do."[336]

The resistance of the Catholic Governments to the progress of a religion
which announced that it would destroy them as soon as it had the power,
was an instinct of self-preservation. No Protestant divine denied or
disguised the truth that his party sought the destruction of
Catholicism, and would accomplish it whenever they could. The
Calvinists, with their usual fearless consistency, held that as civil
and ecclesiastical power must be in the same hands, no prince had any
right to govern who did not belong to them. Even in the Low Countries,
where other sects were free, and the notion of unity abandoned, the
Catholics were oppressed.

This new and aggressive intolerance infected even Catholic countries,
where there was neither, as in Spain, religious unity to be preserved;
nor, as in Austria, a menacing danger to be resisted. For in Spain the
persecution of the Protestants might be defended on the mediaeval
principle of unity, whilst under Ferdinand II. it was provoked in the
hereditary dominions by the imminent peril which threatened to dethrone
the monarch, and to ruin every faithful Catholic. But in France the
Protestant doctrine that every good subject must follow the religion of
his king grew out of the intensity of personal absolutism. At the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the official argument was the will of
the sovereign--an argument which in Germany had reigned so triumphantly
that a single town, which had ten times changed masters, changed its
religion ten times in a century. Bayle justly reproaches the Catholic
clergy of France with having permitted, and even approved, a proceeding
so directly contrary to the spirit of their religion, and to the wishes
of the Pope. A convert, who wrote a book to prove that Huguenots were in
conscience bound to obey the royal edict which proscribed their worship,
met with applause a hundred years later. This fault of the French clergy