The persecution spared no one. It was often sufficient for an enemy to accuse a person of having a liking for the Gospel, when immediately the police laid their hands on him. This was not the king's intention: he had ordered that the judges should inquire whether 'enmity, pique, or revenge gave rise to false accusations;' but the magistrates were not so scrupulous. The terror was universal. 'One sees nothing in Paris,' said a catholic eye-witness, 'but gibbets set up in various places, which surely terrify the people of the said Paris, and those of other places who also see gallowses and executions.'[280] Mezeray, while describing these events, says: 'But for ten that were put to death, a hundred others sprang up from their ashes.'[281] The enemies of the Reformation, feeling that the moment was decisive, redoubled their efforts to destroy it. The French, save a certain numerous class submissive to the clergy, were disposed to receive it. They went to church, indeed, but the majority of the population would willingly have embraced a religion in which the priest did not interpose between man and God. 'Alas!' said the more fervent, 'if the king does not interfere to save the Church, all the warmth of the French for the catholic religion will soon be turned into ice.'[282] [Sidenote: THE KING'S MOTIVES.] The king had a special motive in supporting popery. A striking transformation was going on in France as well as in other parts of Europe; limited monarchy was changing into absolute monarchy. Francis I. thought that men who set God above the king, and died rather than invert the order of these two powers, were very dangerous to despotism, and he swore that, though he courted this religion without his kingdom, he would crush it within. Alas! the task was but too easy. Many were only superficially gained. Nobles without high-mindedness or independence; men of letters who jeered at obscurantism, but who had not tasted the Gospel; ignorant and timid crowds turned their backs upon the Word of God when the flames of the burning piles rose into the air. [Sidenote: STURM'S LETTER TO MELANCHTHON.]