by unjust distinctions.  They were still followed by their armed retainers, and had almost unlimited jurisdiction in their respective governments.  Even the higher clergy gloried in feudal inequalities, and were selected from the noble classes.  The people were not powerful enough to make combinations and extort their rights, unless they followed the standards of military chieftains, arrayed perhaps against the crown and against the parliaments.  We see no popular, independent political movements; even the people, like all classes above them, were firm and enthusiastic in their religious convictions.

The commanding intellect at that time in Europe was John Calvin (a Frenchman, but a citizen of Geneva), whom we have already seen to be a man of marvellous precocity of genius and astonishing logical powers, combined with the most exhaustive erudition on all theological subjects.  His admirers claim a distinct and logical connection between his theology and civil liberty itself.  I confess I cannot see this.  There was nothing democratic about Calvin.  He ruled indeed at Geneva as Savonarola did in Florence, but he did not have as liberal ideas as the Florentine reformer about the political liberties of the people.  He made his faith the dearest thing a man could have, to be defended unto death in the face of the most unrelenting persecution.  It was the tenacity to defend the reformed doctrines, of which, next to Luther, Calvin was the greatest champion, which kindled opposition to civil rulers.  And it was opposition to civil rulers who proved themselves tyrants which led to the struggle for civil liberty; not democratic ideas of right.  These may have been the sequence of agitations and wars, but not their animating cause,—­like the ideas of Rousseau on the French revolutionists.  The original Puritans were not democratic; the Presbyterians of Scotland were not, even when Cromwell led the armies, but not the people, of England.  The Huguenots had no aspirations for civil rights; they only aspired for the right of worshipping God according to the dictates of conscience.  There was nothing popular in their notions of government when Henry IV. headed the forces of the Huguenots; he only aimed at the recognition of religious rights.  The Huguenots never rallied around popular leaders, but rather under the standards of princes and nobles fighting for the right of worshipping God according to the dictation or ideas of Calvin.  They would preserve their schools, their churches, their consistories, and their synods; they would be unmolested in their religious worship.

Now, at the time when Henry IV. was born, in the year 1553, when Henry II. was King of France and Edward VI. was King of England, the ideas of the Reformation, and especially the doctrines of Calvin, had taken a deep and wide hold of the French people.  The Calvinists, as they were called, were a powerful party; in some parts of France they were in a majority.  More than a third of the whole population had enthusiastically