For more than three centuries civilized Europe has been discussing, pro or con, the question of religious liberty, but from instinct and with passion far more than with a serious understanding of what is at the bottom of things. Even in our own day it is not without difficulty that a beginning is being made to understand and accept that principle in its true sense and in all its bearings. Men were wonderfully far from it in 1560, at the accession of Charles IX., a child ten years old; they were entering, in blind confidence, upon a religious war, in order to arrive, only after four centuries of strife and misconception, at a vindication of religious liberty. “Woe to thee, O country, that hast a child for king!” said, in accordance with the Bible, the Venetian Michael Suriano, ambassador to France at that time. Around that royal child, and seeking to have the mastery over France by being masters over him, were struggling the three great parties at that time occupying the stage in the name of religion. The Catholics rejected altogether the idea of religious liberty for the Protestants; the Protestants had absolute need of it, for it was their condition of existence; but they did not wish for it in the case of the Catholics, their adversaries. The third party (_tiers parti_), as we call it nowadays, wished to hold the balance continually wavering between the Catholics and the Protestants, conceding to the former and the latter, alternately, that measure of liberty which was indispensable for most imperfect maintenance of the public peace, and reconcilable with the sovereign power of the kingship. On such conditions was the government of Charles IX. to establish its existence.