Henry M. Baird · 130 of 379

CHAPTER VIII · Controversial pamphlets.

While the Protestants were thus demonstrating, by the fortitude with which they encountered severe suffering and even death, the sincerity of their convictions and the purity of their lives, their enemies were unremitting in exertions to aggravate the odium in which they were held by the people. An inquisitor and doctor of the Sorbonne, the notorious De Mouchy, or Demochares, as he called himself, wrote a pamphlet to prove them heretics by the decisions of the doctors. A bishop found the signs of the true church in the bells at the sound of which the Catholics assembled, and marks of Antichrist in the pistols and arquebuses whose discharge was said to be the signal for the gathering of the heretics. A third controversialist went so far as to accuse the Protestants not only of impurity, but of denying the divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and even the existence of God.