of the sanguinary kind, that they do all the hurt that can possibly be done in cold blood."

"In answer to this," says Blackstone, "it may be observed that these laws are seldom exerted to their utmost rigour, and, indeed, if they were, it would be very difficult to excuse them, for they are rather to be accounted for from their history, and the urgency of the times which produced them, than to be approved, upon a cool review, as a standing system of laws."

say,

This account and history of them he then gives, and at last ventures to "that if a time should ever arrive, and perhaps it is not very distant (this was written between the years 1755 and 1765), when all fears of a pretender shall have vanished," &c. "it may not be amiss to review and soften these rigorous edicts," &c.

The present reign (of George III.) has been a reign of concession, that is, a reign of progressive civil wisdom and progressive religious knowledge on these subjects.

The question is at length debated among all reasonable men, as properly a question of civil policy. The nature of religious truth and the rights of religious inquiry are better understood than they were by our ancestors. These are held sacred, in theory at least. And, therefore, all that now remains to be observed is, that no real conversions can be expected to take place, while penal statutes or test acts exist; because while these exist, the point of honour is against the conversion.

The members of the Roman Catholic or Dissenting communions will gradually become more and more like the members of any more enlightened establishment in their views and opinions, when civil offices and distinctions are first laid open to them, but in no other way. Those of them who are of some condition or rank in life, or of superior natural talents, will first suffer this alteration in their views and opinions. Then successful merchants and manufacturers; and this sort of improvement will propagate downward. At length the clerical part will be gradually improved in their views and opinions, like the laity. The outward and visible signs of the worship of the Roman Catholic or Dissenting communion may alter, or may in the mean time remain the same; but the alteration in their minds and tempers will have taken place, sufficiently for all civil purposes, gradually, insensibly, and with or without acknowledgment or alteration in their creeds and doctrines. This is the only conversion that can now be thought of: an alteration this, not of a day or a year, but to be produced in a course of years by the unrestrained operation of the increasing knowledge and prosperity of mankind. Nothing could have kept the inferior and more ignorant sects and churches from gradually assimilating themselves to the superior and more enlightened communion, in the course of the last half century, but tests and penal statutes, and all the various machinery of exclusion and proscription.

But neither on the one side nor the other are the spiritual pastors and teachers to be at all listened to in these discussions. What is reasonable is to be done, to be done from time to time, and the event need not be feared. Statesmen will never advance the civil and religious interests of the community, if they are to wait till they can settle in any manner satisfactory to the Dissenting teacher and the established Churchman, to the Roman Catholic and to the Protestant minister, their opposite and long-established claims and opinions claims and opinions from which it is the business of the statesmen, as much as possible, to escape. I am speaking now of men as rulers of kingdoms, not as individuals; such men are not to take their own

:

views of religious truth for granted, and propagate it accordingly; the state would thus necessarily be made intolerant.

"To overthrow any religion," says Montesquieu (or, he might have added, any particular sect in religion)," we must assail it by the good things of the world and by the hopes of fortune; not by that which makes men remember it, but by that which causes them to forget it; not by that which outrages mankind, but by everything which soothes them, and facilitates the other passions of humanity in obtaining predominance over religion."

These notes were written in the year 1810, and placed on the table when the two lectures on the Reformation were delivered. Mr. Hallam published his History nearly twenty years after. He very thoroughly discusses the subject of the statutes of Elizabeth's reign, and then sums up in the following words:"It is much to be regretted that any writers worthy of respect should either, through undue prejudice against an adverse religion, or through timid acquiescence in whatever has been enacted, have offered for this odious code the false pretext of political necessity. That necessity, I am persuaded, can never be made out. The statutes were in many instances absolutely unjust; in others not demanded by circumstances; in almost all, prompted by religious bigotry, by excessive apprehension, or by the arbitrary spirit with which our government was administered under Elizabeth."-End of 3rd chap. of his Constitutional History, pages 229 and 230 of 8vo. edit. of 1829. At the end of the fourth chapter he observes, speaking of the Puritans: "After forty years of constantly aggravated molestation of the nonconforming clergy, their numbers were become greater, their prosperity more deeply rooted, their enmity to the established order more irreconcilable." He acknowledges the difficulty of the case, but observes "that the obstinacy of bold and sincere men is not to be quelled by any punishments that do not exterminate them, and that they are not likely to entertain a less conceit of their own reason, when they find no arguments so much relied on to refute it as that of force; that statesmen invariably take a better view of such questions than churchmen."

"It appears by no means unlikely, that by reforming the abuses and corruption of the spiritual courts, by abandoning a part of their jurisdiction, so heterogeneous and so unduly attained, by abrogating obnoxious and at best frivolous ceremonies, by restraining pluralities of benefices, by ceasing to discountenance the most diligent ministers, and by more temper and disinterestedness in their own behaviour, the bishops would have palliated, to an indefinite degree, that dissatisfaction with the established scheme of polity, which its want of resemblance to that of other Protestant churches must more or less have produced. Such a reformation would at least have contented those reasonable and moderate persons who occupy sometimes a more extensive ground between contending factions than the zealots of either are willing to believe or acknowledge."

IN

LECTURE XI.

FRANCE-CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS WARS.

In my lecture of yesterday, I concluded my observations on the Reformation.

I must now turn to the French history, and in the following lecture I must endeavour to give you some general notion of the history of a whole century, the sixteenth.

In considering the first part of this century, I shall have to notice the wars of enterprise and ambition carried on by the French monarchs, Charles VIII. and his successors.

In considering the second part of the century, I shall have to allude to the great subject of the civil and religious wars of France.

These transactions and events cannot be detailed in any manner, however slight.

I can only make general remarks-first, on the one period, and then on the other; mentioning, at the same time, such books' as will furnish you hereafter with those particulars on which I am now obliged to comment, as if you were entirely acquainted with them already.

We left the French history at the death of Louis XI.; before, therefore, we arrive at the civil and religious wars of France, we must pass through the reigns of Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I.

Of these the reader will be able to form a very adequate idea by reading the works of Mr. Roscoe and Dr. Robertson. These reigns may also be read in Mezeray, a writer of great authority. Or they may be read in Hénault, and Millot, and Velly, as the rest of the French history has been.

De Thou or Thuanus, it may be also observed, introduces his history with a general review of France and the

state of Europe; a portion of his great work that has been much admired, and then begins with the year 1546, a little before the death of Francis I. The lesson which may, on the whole, be derived from this first half of the sixteenth century, is the folly, the crime, of attempting foreign conquest: this is the leading observation I have to offer. Charles VIII. of France had descended into Italy, Louis XII. must therefore do the same; so must Francis I. and Henry II. The honour of the French nation was, it seems, engaged.

But Spain, which was becoming the great rival state in Europe, chose also, like France, to be, as she conceived, powerful and renowned; Ferdinand, therefore, and Charles V. and afterwards Philip II., were to waste, with the same ignorant ferocity, the lives and happiness of their subjects: and for what purpose? Not to keep the balance of Europe undisturbed; not to expel the French from Italy, and to abstain from all projects of conquest themselves; but, on the contrary, by rushing in, to contend for the whole or a part of the plunder.

The Italians, in the meantime, whose unhappy country* was thus made the arena on which these unprincipled combatants were to struggle with each other, adopted what appeared to them the only resource,—that of fighting the one against the other-if possible to destroy both; leaguing themselves sometimes with France, sometimes with Spain, and suffering from each power every possible calamity; while they were exhibiting, in their own conduct, all the degrading arts of duplicity and intrigue.

A more wretched and disgusting picture of mankind cannot well be displayed: all the faults of which man, in his social state, is capable; opposite extremes of guilt united; all the vices of pusillanimity, and all the crimes of courage.

There is a well-known beautiful sonnet in the Italian, translated by Mr. Roscoe, and imitated by Lord Byron, a Lamentation that Italy had not been more powerful or less attractive, which I have seen an Italian repeat almost with tears.

The miseries and degradation of Italy have never ceased since the fall of the Roman empire. The great misfortune of this country has always been, its divisions into petty states, a misfortune that was irremediable. No cardinal made into a sovereign could ever be expected to combine its discordant parts into a free government; and unless this was done, nothing was done; could this, indeed, have been effected, the Italians might have been virtuous and happy.

Artifice, and a policy proverbially faithless, were vain expedients against the great monarchies of Europe. But while Italy was to be thus destroyed by these unprincipled despoilers, what in the meantime was to be the consequence to these very monarchies? In Spain, the real sources of power neglected; immense revenue and no wealth; possessions multiplied abroad, and no prosperous provinces at home; the strength of the country exhausted in maintaining a powerful army, not for the purposes of defence, but of tyranny and injustice; and the whole system of policy, in every part, and on every occasion, a long and disgusting train of mistake and guilt.

In France, the same neglect of the real sources of strength and happiness; the produce of the land and labour of the community employed in military enterprises; the genius of the nobles made more and more warlike; military fame, and the intrigues of gallantry (congenial pursuits), converted into the only objects of anxiety and ambition; licentiousness everywhere the result, in the court and in the nation; the power of the crown unreasonably strengthened; the people oppressed with taxes, their interests never considered; the energies of this great country misdirected and abused; and the science of public happiness (except, indeed, in the arts of amusement and splendour) totally unknown or disregarded.

France and Spain, therefore, concur with Italy in completing the lesson that is exhibited to our reflection: ambition and injustice have their victims in the countries that are