ants. The fear of being
sent to the galleys for life--the threat of losing the whole of one's
goods and property--the alarm of seeing one's household broken up, the
children seized by the priests and sent to the nearest monkery or
nunnery for maintenance and education--all these considerations
doubtless had their effect in increasing the number of conversions.

Persecution is not easy to bear. To have all the powers and
authorities employed against one's life, interests, and faith, is
what few can persistently oppose. And torture, whether it be slow or
sudden, is what many persons, by reason of their physical capacity,
have not the power to resist. Even the slow torment of dragoons
quartered in the houses of the heretics--their noise and shoutings,
their drinking and roistering, the insults and outrages they were
allowed to practise--was sufficient to compel many at once to declare
themselves to be converted.

Indeed, pain is, of all things, one of the most terrible of
converters. One of the prisoners condemned to the galleys, when he saw
the tortures which the victims about him had to endure by night and by
day, said that sufferings such as these were "enough to make one
conform to Buddhism or Mahommedanism as well as to Popery"; and
doubtless it was force and suffering which converted the Huguenots,
far more than love of the King or love of the Pope.

By all these means--forcible, threatening, insulting, and
bribing--employed for the conversion of the Huguenots, the Catholics
boasted that in the space of three months they had received an
accession of five hundred thousand new converts to the Church of Rome.

But the "new converts" did not gain much by their change. They were
forced to attend mass, but remained suspected. Even the dragoons who
converted them, called them dastards and deniers of their faith. They
tried, if they could, to avoid confession, but confess they must.
There was the fine, confiscation of goods, and imprisonment at the
priest's back.

Places were set apart for them in the churches, where they were penned
up like lepers. A person was stationed at the door with a roll of
their names, to which they were obliged to answer. During the service,
the most prominent among them were made to carry the lights, the holy
water, the incense, and such things, which to Huguenots were an
abomination. They were also required to partake of the Host, which
Protestants regarded as an awful mockery of the glorio