_Marriage and Paternal Authority._—Alliances were no longer permitted between the Reformed and (Roman) Catholics, even in the case of former relations that marriage had legitimized. The Reformed were not allowed to have (Roman) Catholic valets, for fear the latter should be seduced; and soon, by an inverse excess, they were prohibited from having any other than (Roman) Catholics, because such could be employed as spies. The nearest relations were prohibited from being guardians or curators. Fathers and mothers were forbidden to send their children into foreign countries before the age of sixteen. It was ordered that all illegitimate children, of every age and condition, should be held as (Roman) Catholics, and educated in that religion: and as this ordinance was made to act retrospectively, results flowed from it as ridiculous as they were odious. Persons of sixty and eighty years of age were summoned to enter the church of Rome, because their illegitimate condition had legally rendered them (Roman) Catholics. Matters even went further than this. An edict of the 17th of June, 1681, declared that the children of the Reformed might abjure at the age of _seven_. “We will, and it pleaseth us,” said the ordinance, “that our said subjects of the pretended Reformed religion, as well male as female, having attained the age of seven years, may, and it shall be lawful for them to, embrace the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion, and, for this end, that they be received to make abjuration, without their fathers and mothers and other relatives offering _the least impediment_, under any pretext whatsoever!” These children were free to withdraw themselves whenever they liked, and the parents were bound to provide them with a pension for their maintenance. Fearful consequences attended [the passing of] this law. Every family was disturbed. Friends, (Roman) Catholic neighbours, servants, the slightest mark of kindness to their children on the part of a stranger, were mistrusted. A priest, an envious acquaintance, an enemy, a discontented talebearer, might declare before a justice that such and such a child had made the sign of the cross, or kissed an image of the Virgin, or desired to enter a (Roman) Catholic church; and this was often sufficient to justify their abduction, particularly of those who were rich enough to pay an allowance, and to shut them up in some convent under the direction of monks, nuns, and the [secular] clergy.