One fact immediately deserves to be pointed out; and that is the number and the practical character of meetings officially held at this period by the Protestants: an indisputable proof of the liberty they enjoyed. These meetings were of two sorts; one, the synods, were for the purpose of regulating their faith, their worship, their purely religious affairs. Between 1594 and 1609, under the sway of Henry IV., Catholic king, seven national synods of the Protestant church in France held their sessions in seven different towns, and discussed with perfect freedom such questions of religious doctrine and discipline as were interesting to them. At the same epoch, between 1593 and 1608, the French Protestants met at eleven assemblies, specially summoned to deliberate, not in these cases upon questions of faith and religious discipline, but upon their temporal and political interests, upon their relations towards the state, and upon the conduct they were to adopt under the circumstances of their times. The principle to which minds, and even matters, to a certain extent, have now attained, the deep-seated separation between the civil and the religious life, and their mutual independence, this higher principle was unknown to the sixteenth century; the believer and the citizen were then but one, and the efforts of laws and governments were directed towards bringing the whole nation entire into the same state of unity. And as they did not succeed therein, their attempts produced strife instead of unity, war instead of peace. When the French Protestants of the sixteenth century met in the assemblies which they themselves called political, they acted as one nation confronting another nation, and labored to form a state within state. We will borrow from the intelligent and learned _Histoire d’Henri IV.,_ by M. Poirson, (t. ii. pp. 497-500), a picture of one of those assemblies and its work. “After the king’s abjuration, and at the end of the year 1593, the French Huguenots renewed at Mantes their old union, and swore to live and die united in their profession of faith. Henry was in hopes that they would stop short at a religious demonstration; but they made it a starting-point for a new political and military organization on behalf of the Calvinistic party. They took advantage of a general permission granted them by Henry, and met, not in synod, but in general assembly, at the town of Sainte Foy, in the month of June, 1594. Thereupon they divided all France into nine great provinces or circles, composed each of several governments or provinces of the realm. Each circle had a separate council, composed of from five to seven members, and commissioned to fix and apportion the separate imposts, to keep up a standing army, to collect the supplies necessary for the maintenance and defence of the party. The Calvinistic republic had its general assemblies, composed of nine deputies or representatives from each of the nine circles.