Henry M. Baird · 217 of 379

CHAPTER X · How to be accounted for.

No feature of the rise of the Reformation in France is more remarkable than the sudden impulse which it received during the last year or two of Henry the Second's life, and especially within the brief limits of the reign of his eldest son. The seed had been sown assiduously for nearly forty years; but the fruit of so much labor had been comparatively slight and unsatisfactory. Much of the return proved to be of a literary and philosophical, rather than of a religious character, and tended to intellectual development instead of the purification of religions belief and practice. Much of the seed was choked by relentless persecution. Bishops and preachers, the gay poet, and the time-serving courtier, fell away with alarming facility, when the blight of the royal displeasure fell upon those who professed a desire to abolish the superstitious observances of the established church.