y to their ostensible one, such monstrous results will happen;
and as extremes will join, however opposite they appear in their
beginnings, John Knox and Father Petre, in office, would have equally
served James the Second as confessor and prime minister!

A fact relating to the famous Justus Lipsius proves the difficulty of
forming a clear notion of TOLERATION. This learned man, after having
been ruined by the religious wars of the Netherlands, found an
honourable retreat in a professor's chair at Leyden, and without
difficulty abjured papacy. He published some political works: and
adopted as his great principle, that only _one religion_ should be
allowed to a people, and that no clemency should be granted to
non-conformists, who, he declares, should be pursued by sword and fire:
in this manner a single member would be cut off to preserve the body
sound. _Ure, seca_--are his words. Strange notions these in a protestant
republic; and, in fact, in Holland it was approving of all the horrors
of their oppressors, the Duke d'Alva and Philip the Second, from which
they had hardly recovered.[173] It was a principle by which we must
inevitably infer, says Bayle, that in Holland no other mode of religious
belief but one sect should be permitted; and that those Pagans who had
hanged the missionaries of the gospel had done what they ought. Lipsius
found himself sadly embarrassed when refuted by Theodore Cornhert,[174]
the firm advocate of political and religious freedom, and at length
Lipsius, that protestant with a catholic heart, was forced to eat his
words, like Pistol his onion, declaring that the two objectionable
words, _ure_, _seca_, were borrowed from medicine, meaning not literally
_fire_ and _sword_, but a strong efficacious remedy, one of those
powerful medicines to expel poison. Jean de Serres, a warm Huguenot,
carried the principle of TOLERATION so far in his "Inventaire generale
de l'Histoire de France," as to blame Charles Martel for compelling the
Frisans, whom he had conquered, to adopt Christianity! "A pardonable
zeal," he observes, "in a warrior; but in fact the minds of men cannot
be gained over by arms, nor that religion forced upon them, which must
be introduced into the hearts of men by reason." It is curious to see a
protestant, in his zeal for toleration, blaming a king for forcing
idolaters to become Christians; and to have found an opportunity to
express his opinions in the dark history of the eighth cent