lace. Yet they were at any moment ready to
lay down their arms and return to their allegiance, provided only a
reasonable degree of liberty of worship were assured to them. This,
however, their misguided and bigoted monarch, would not tolerate; for
he had sworn that no persons were to be suffered in his dominions save
those who were of "the King's religion."

The circumstances accompanying the outbreak of the Protestant
peasantry in the Cevennes in many respects resembled those which
attended the rising of the Scotch Covenanters in 1679. Both were
occasioned by the persistent attempts of men in power to enforce a
particular form of religion at the point of the sword. The resisters
of the policy were in both cases Calvinists;[37] and they were alike
indomitable and obstinate in their assertion of the rights of
conscience. They held that religion was a matter between man and his
God, and not between man and his sovereign or the Pope. The peasantry
in both cases persevered in their own form of worship. In Languedoc,
the mountaineers of the Cevennes held their assemblies in "The
Desert;" and in Scotland, the "hill-folk" of the West held their
meetings on the muirs. In the one country as in the other, the
monarchy sent out soldiers as their missionaries--Louis XIV. employing
the dragoons of Louvois and Baville, and Charles II. those of
Claverhouse and Dalzell. These failing, new instruments of torture
were invented for their "conversion." But the people, in both cases,
continued alike stubborn in their adherence to their own simple and,
as some thought, uncouth form of faith.

[Footnote 37: Whether it be that Calvinism is eclectic as
regards races and individuals, or that it has (as is most
probably the case) a powerful formative influence upon
individual character, certain it is that the Calvinists of
all countries have presented the strongest possible
resemblance to each other--the Calvinists of Geneva and
Holland, the Huguenots of France, the Covenanters of
Scotland, and the Puritans of Old and New England, seeming,
as it were, to be but members of the same family. It is
curious to speculate on the influence which the religion of
Calvin--himself a Frenchman--might have exercised on the
history of France, as well as on the individual character of
Frenchmen, had the balance of forces carried the nation