Causes."

Our present inquiry concerns "cause and pretext."

Leo X. projected an alliance of the sovereigns of Christendom against
the Turks. The avowed object was to oppose the progress of the Ottomans
against the Mamelukes of Egypt, who were more friendly to the
Christians; but the concealed motive with his holiness was to enrich
himself and his family with the spoils of Christendom, and to aggrandise
the papal throne by war; and such, indeed, the policy of these pontiffs
had always been in those mad crusades which they excited against the
East.

The Reformation, excellent as its results have proved in the cause of
genuine freedom, originated in no purer source than human passions and
selfish motives: it was the progeny of avarice in Germany, of novelty in
France, and of love in England. The latter is elegantly alluded to by
Gray--

And gospel-light first beam'd from Bullen's eyes.

The Reformation is considered by the Duke of Nevers, in a work printed
in 1590, as it had been by Francis I., in his Apology in 1537, as a
_coup-d'etat_ of Charles V. towards universal monarchy. The duke says,
that the emperor silently permitted Luther to establish his principles
in Germany, that they might split the confederacy of the elective
princes, and by this division facilitate their more easy conquest, and
play them off one against another, and by these means to secure the
imperial crown hereditary in the house of Austria. Had Charles V. not
been the mere creature of his politics, and had he felt any zeal for the
Catholic cause, which he pretended to fight for, never would he have
allowed the new doctrines to spread for more than twenty years without
the least opposition.

The famous League in France was raised for "religion and the relief of
public grievances;" such was the pretext! After the princes and the
people had alike become its victims, this "league" was discovered to
have been formed by the pride and the ambition of the Guises, aided by
the machinations of the Jesuits against the attempts of the Prince of
Conde to dislodge them from their "seat of power." While the Huguenots
pillaged, burnt, and massacred, declaring in their manifestoes that they
were only fighting to _release the king_, whom they asserted was a
prisoner of the Guises, the Catholics repaid them with the same
persecution and the same manifestoes, declaring that they only wished
_to liberate the Prince of Conde_, who was the prisoner of the
Huguen