men, women, and children, who allowed themselves to be arrested without making any resistance, were taken.  They were all sent before the Parliament of Paris; fourteen of the men were sentenced to be burned alive in the great marketplace at Meaux, on the spot nearest to the house in which the crime of heresy had been committed; and their wives, together with their nearest relatives, were sentenced to be present at the execution, “the men bare-headed and the women ranged beside them individually, in such sort that they might be distinguished amongst the rest.”  The decree was strictly carried out.

[Illustration:  Burning of Reformers at Meaux——­188]

It costs a pang to recur to these hideous exhibitions, but it must be done; for history not only has a right, but is bound to do justice upon the errors and crimes of the past, especially when the past had no idea of guilt in the commission of them.  A wit of the last century, Champfort, used to say, “There is nothing more dangerous than an honest man engaged in a rascally calling.”  There is nothing more dangerous than errors and crimes of which the perpetrators do not see the absurd and odious character.  The contemporary historian, Sleidan, says, expressly, “The common people in France hold that there are no people more wicked and criminal that heretics; generally, as long as they are a prey to the blazing fagots, the people around them are excited to frenzy and curse them in the midst of their torments.”  The sixteenth century is that period of French history at which this intellectual and moral blindness cost France “Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands,”—­ most dear; it supplied the bad passions of men with a means, of which they amply availed themselves, of gratifying then without scruple and without remorse.  If, in the early part of this century, the Reformation was as yet without great leaders, it was not, nevertheless, amongst only the laborers, the humble and the poor, that it found confessors and martyrs.  The provincial nobility, the burgesses of the towns, the magistracy, the bar, the industrial classes as well as the learned, even then furnished their quota of devoted and faithful friends.  A nobleman, a Picard by birth, born about 1490 at Passy, near Paris, where he generally lived, Louis de Berquin by name, was one of the most distinguished of them by his social position, his elevated ideas, his learning, the purity of his morals, and the dignity of his life.  Possessed of a patrimonial estate, near Abbeville, which brought him in a modest income of six hundred crowns a year, and a bachelor, he devoted himself to study and to religious matters with independence of mind and with a pious heart.  “Most faithfully observant,” says Erasmus, “of the ordinances and rites of the church, to wit, prescribed fasts, holy days, forbidden meats, masses, sermons, and, in a word, all, that tends to piety, he strongly reprobated the doctrines of Luther.”  He was none the less, in 1523, denounced to the Parliament of Paris as being on the side of the Reformers.  He had books, it was said; he even composed them himself on questions of faith, and he had been engaged in some sort of dispute with the theologian William de Coutance, head of Harcourt College.