bishops had never so vehemently declaimed
against what, in ludicrous rage, one of the high-flying presbyterians
called "a cursed intolerable toleration!" They advocated the rights of
persecution; and "shallow Edwards," as Milton calls the author of "The
Gangraena," published a treatise _against toleration_. They who had so
long complained of "the licensers," now sent all the books they
condemned to penal fires. Prynne now vindicated the very doctrines under
which he himself had so severely suffered; assuming the highest possible
power of civil government, even to the infliction of death on its
opponents. Prynne lost all feeling for the ears of others!

The idea of toleration was not intelligible for too long a period in the
annals of Europe: no parties probably could conceive the idea of
toleration in the struggle for predominance. Treaties are not proffered
when conquest is the concealed object. Men were immolated! a massacre
was a sacrifice! medals were struck to commemorate these holy
persecutions![167] The destroying angel, holding in one hand a cross,
and in the other a sword, with these words--_Vgonottorum Strages_,
1572--"The massacre of the Huguenots"--proves that toleration will not
agree with that date.[168] Castelnau, a statesman and a humane man, was
at a loss how to decide on a point of the utmost importance to France.
In 1532 they first began to burn the Lutherans or Calvinists, and to cut
out the tongues of all protestants, "that they might no longer protest."
According to Father Paul, fifty thousand persons had perished in the
Netherlands, by different tortures, for religion. But a change in the
religion of the state, Castelnau considered, would occasion one in the
government: he wondered how it happened, that the more they punished
with death, it only increased the number of the victims: martyrs
produced proselytes. As a statesman, he looked round the great field of
human actions in the history of the past; there he discovered that the
Romans were more enlightened in their actions than ourselves; that
Trajan commanded Pliny the younger not to molest the Christians for
their _religion_, but should their conduct endanger the state, to put
down _illegal assemblies_; that Julian the Apostate expressly forbad the
_execution_ of the Christians, who then imagined that they were securing
their salvation by martyrdom; but he ordered all their goods to be
_confiscated_--a severe punishment--by which Julian preven