narchical Governments," etc. The volume ends as follows:

"Thus we have seen the dangerous doctrines and positions, the secret plots and open practices, the sacrileges, spoils and rapines, the tumults, murders and seditions, the horrid treasons and rebellions, which have been raised by the Presbyterians in most parts of Christendom for one hundred. years and upward," etc., etc.

Dean Swift, speaking of those who took refuge in Geneva from persecution in England, says:

"When they returned, they were grown so fond of the government and religion of the place that they used all possible endeavors to introduce both into our country. From hence they proceeded to quarrel with the kingly government because the city of Geneva, to which their fathers had flown for refuge, was a commonwealth or government of the people."

The poet Dryden, a double apostate—an

40 PRESBYTERIANS AND THE REVOLUTION.

apostate from Cromwellian republicanism to the despotism of Charles II., and then from Puritanism to Romanism-wrote, as well he might:

"Quickened with fire below, your monsters breed

In fenny Holland and in fruitful Tweed;
And, like the first, the last affects to be
Drawn from the dregs of a democracy.

"But as the poisons of the deadliest kind
Are to their own unhappy coasts confined,
So presbytery, in its pestilential zeal,
Can flourish only in a commonweal."

CHAPTER IV.

PRESBYTERIAN SPIRIT IN HARMONY WITH THAT OF THE REVOLUTION.

A

REASONABLY thorough discussion

of this theme would take us across the ocean and back through past centuries, since our earlier forefathers and many of the noblest of our Revolutionary champions came to us from other lands, and the principles that formed the life of the American struggle emerged to view and embodied themselves in action on many a foreign shore.

"A young French refugee," writes Mr. Bancroft, "skilled alike in theology and civil law, entering the republic of Geneva, and conforming its ecclesiastical discipline to the principles of republican simplicity, established a party of which Englishmen

became members and New England the

L

asylum.

"Calvinism was revolutionary. By the side of the eternal mountains, the perennial snows and arrowy rivers of Switzerland, it established a government without a king. It was powerful in France. It entered Holland, inspiring an industrious nation with heroic enthusiasm. It penetrated Scotland, and nerved its rugged but hearty envoy to resist the flatterers of Queen Mary. It infused itself into England, and placed its plebeian sympathies in strong resistance to the courtly hierarchy. Inviting every man to read the Bible, and teaching as a divine revelation the natural equality of man, it claimed freedom of utterance.

"It inspired its converts to cross the Atlantic and sail away from the traditions of the Church, from hereditary power, from the sovereignty of earthly kings, and from all dominion but that of the Bible and such as arose from natural reason and equity."

In 1571 the French General Assembly met at Rochelle, with Theodore Beza as moderator. There were present at that Assembly the queen of Navarre, Henry, the Bourbon prince of Condé, Prince Louis, count of Nassau, Admiral Coligny and other lords and gentlemen. That General Assembly represented and ruled over twenty-one hundred and fifty churches. In some of these churches there were ten thousand members.

Then came the massacre of St. Bartholomew, followed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and this by every species of per- . secution and torture of which the Romish brain has been ever so fertile-plunder of property, burning of religious books, tearing of children from their parents, dragging of ministers to torture, breaking them on the wheel, killing them and throwing their bleeding corpses to dogs; some were roasted by slow fires, some were gashed with knives. and some torn with red-hot pincers.