So far as cruelty was concerned, everything in the conduct of their antagonists was calculated to provoke the Protestants to bitter retaliation. The army of Guise was merciless. If the infuriated Huguenots selected the priests that fell into their hands for the especial monuments of their retribution, it was because the priesthood as a body had become the instigators of savage barbarity, instead of being the ministers of peace; because when they did not, like Ronsard the poet, themselves buckle on the sword, or revel in blood, like the monks of Saint Calais,[149] they still fanned, as they had for years been fanning, the flame of civil war, denouncing toleration or compromise, wielding the weapons of the church to enforce the pious duty of exterminating every foul calumny invented to the disadvantage of the reformers. No wonder, then, that the ecclesiastical dress itself became the badge of deadly and irreconcilable hostility, and that in the course of this unhappy war many a priest was cut down without any examination into his private views or personal history. Parliament, too, was setting the example of cruelty by reckless orders amounting almost to independent legislation. By a series of "arrets" succeeding each other rapidly in the months of June and July, the door was opened wider and wider for popular excess. When the churches of Meaux were visited by an iconoclastic rabble on the twenty-sixth of June, the Parisian parliament, on the thirtieth of June, employed the disorder as the pretext of a judicial "declaration" that made the culprits liable to all the penalties of treason, and permitted any one to put them to death without further authorization. The populace of Paris needed no fuller powers to attack the Huguenots, for, within two or three days, sixty men and women had been killed, robbed, and thrown into the river. Parliament, therefore, found it convenient to terminate the massacre by a second order restricting the application of the declaration to persons taken in the very act.[150] A few days later (July, 1562), other arrets empowered all inhabitants of towns and villages to take up arms against those who molested priests, sacked churches, or "held conventicles and unlawful assemblies," whether public or secret; and to arrest the ministers, deacons, and other ecclesiastical functionaries for trial, as guilty of treason against God as well as man.[151] Not content with these appeals to popular passion,[152] however, the Parisian judges soon gave practical exemplifications of their intolerant principles; for two royal officers--the "lieutenant general" of Pontoise, and the "lieutenant" of Senlis--were publicly hung; the former for encouraging the preaching of God's word "in other form than the ancient church" authorized, the latter for "celebrating the Lord's Supper according to the Genevese fashion." These were, according to the curate of St. Barthelemi, the first