The idea of toleration was not intelligible for too long a period in the annals of Europe: no parties probably could conceive the idea of toleration in the struggle for predominance. Treaties are not proffered when conquest is the concealed object. Men were immolated! a massacre was a sacrifice! medals were struck to commemorate these holy persecutions![167] The destroying angel, holding in one hand a cross, and in the other a sword, with these words--_Vgonottorum Strages_, 1572--"The massacre of the Huguenots"--proves that toleration will not agree with that date.[168] Castelnau, a statesman and a humane man, was at a loss how to decide on a point of the utmost importance to France. In 1532 they first began to burn the Lutherans or Calvinists, and to cut out the tongues of all protestants, "that they might no longer protest." According to Father Paul, fifty thousand persons had perished in the Netherlands, by different tortures, for religion. But a change in the religion of the state, Castelnau considered, would occasion one in the government: he wondered how it happened, that the more they punished with death, it only increased the number of the victims: martyrs produced proselytes. As a statesman, he looked round the great field of human actions in the history of the past; there he discovered that the Romans were more enlightened in their actions than ourselves; that Trajan commanded Pliny the younger not to molest the Christians for their _religion_, but should their conduct endanger the state, to put down _illegal assemblies_; that Julian the Apostate expressly forbad the _execution_ of the Christians, who then imagined that they were securing their salvation by martyrdom; but he ordered all their goods to be _confiscated_--a severe punishment--by which Julian prevented more than he could have done by persecutions. "All this," he adds, "we read in ecclesiastical history."[169] Such were the sentiments of Castelnau, in 1560. Amidst perplexities of state necessity, and of our common humanity, the notion of _toleration_ had not entered into the views of the statesman. It was also at this time that De Sainctes, a great controversial writer, declared, that had the fires lighted for the destruction of Calvinism not been extinguished, the sect had not spread! About half a century subsequent to this period, Thuanus was, perhaps, the first great mind who appears to have insinuated to the French monarch and his nation, that they might live at peace with heretics; by which avowal he called down on himself the haughty indignation of Rome, and a declaration that the man who spoke in favour of heretics must necessarily be one of the first class. Hear the afflicted historian: "Have men no compassion, after forty years passed full of continual miseries? Have they no fear after the loss of the Netherlands, occasioned by the frantic obstinacy which marked the times? I grieve that such sentiments should have occasioned my book to have been