ted more than
he could have done by persecutions. "All this," he adds, "we read in
ecclesiastical history."[169] Such were the sentiments of Castelnau, in
1560. Amidst perplexities of state necessity, and of our common
humanity, the notion of _toleration_ had not entered into the views of
the statesman. It was also at this time that De Sainctes, a great
controversial writer, declared, that had the fires lighted for the
destruction of Calvinism not been extinguished, the sect had not spread!
About half a century subsequent to this period, Thuanus was, perhaps,
the first great mind who appears to have insinuated to the French
monarch and his nation, that they might live at peace with heretics; by
which avowal he called down on himself the haughty indignation of Rome,
and a declaration that the man who spoke in favour of heretics must
necessarily be one of the first class. Hear the afflicted historian:
"Have men no compassion, after forty years passed full of continual
miseries? Have they no fear after the loss of the Netherlands,
occasioned by the frantic obstinacy which marked the times? I grieve
that such sentiments should have occasioned my book to have been
examined with a rigour that amounts to calumny." Such was the language
of Thuanus, in a letter written in 1606;[170] which indicates an
approximation to _toleration_, but which term was not probably yet found
in any dictionary. We may consider, as so many attempts at toleration,
the great national synod of Dort, whose history is amply written by
Brandt; and the mitigating protestantism of Laud, to approximate to the
ceremonies of the Roman church; but the synod, after holding about two
hundred sessions, closed, dividing men into universalists and
semi-universalists, supralapsarians and sublapsarians! The _reformed_
themselves produced the _remonstrants_; and Laud's ceremonies ended in
placing the altar eastward, and in raising the scaffold for the monarchy
and the hierarchy. Error is circuitous when it will do what it has not
yet learnt. They were pressing for conformity to do that which, a
century afterwards, they found could only be done by _toleration_.

The _secret history of toleration_ among certain parties has been
disclosed to us by a curious document, from that religious Machiavel,
the fierce ascetic republican John Knox, a calvinistical Pope. "While
the posterity of Abraham," says that mighty and artful reformer, "were
_few in number_, and while they sojo