had flocked in masses to St. Denis and been present at the ceremony.  The vaulted roof of the church resounded with their shouts of Hurrah for the king!  There was the same welcome on the part of the dwellers in the country when Henry repaired to the valley of Montmorency and to Montmartre to perform his devotions there.  Here, then, was religious peace, a prelude to political reconciliation between the monarch and the great majority of his subjects.

CHAPTER XXXVI.——­HENRY IV., CATHOLIC KING. (1593-1610.)

During the months, weeks, nay, it might be said, days immediately mediately following Henry IV.’s abjuration, a great number of notable persons and important towns, and almost whole provinces, submitted to the Catholic king.  Henry was reaping the fruits of his decision; France was flocking to him.  But the general sentiments of a people are far from satisfying and subduing the selfish passions of the parties which have taken form and root in its midst.  Religious and political peace responded to and sufficed for the desires of the great majority of Frenchmen, Catholic and Protestant; but it did not at all content the fanatics, Leaguer or Huguenot.  The former wanted the complete extirpation of heretics; the latter the complete downfall of Catholicism.  Neither these nor those were yet educated up to the higher principle of religious peace, distinction between the civil and the intellectual order, freedom of thought and of faith guaranteed by political liberty.  Even at the present day, the community of France, nation and government, all the while that they proclaim this great and salutary truth, do not altogether understand and admit its full bearing.  The sixteenth century was completely ignorant of it; Leaguers and Huguenots were equally convinced that they possessed, in the matter of religion, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that they were in their right to propagate its empire at any price.  Thence arose, in respect of religious peace, and of Henry IV., who naturally desired it as the requirement and the wish of France, a great governmental difficulty.

It is honorable to human nature that it never submits freely and sincerely to anything but what it considers not only useful, but essentially true and just; its passions bow to principles only; wherever the higher principle is wanting, there also is wanting the force that compels respect from passion.  Now the fanatics, Leaguer and Huguenot, had a fixed principle; with the former, it was the religious sovereignty of the pope, as representative and depositary of the unity of the Christian church; with the others, it was the negation of this sovereignty and the revindication of the free regimen of the primitive Christian church.  To these fixed and peremptory principles the government of Henry IV. had nothing similar to oppose; it spoke in the name of social interests, of the public peace,