3. The Reformation In France.--France was the first country where the reformation that commenced in Germany and Switzerland, very soon and under the severest oppressions, found many adherents. No country seems to have been so long and so well prepared for it as this; and yet here it met the most violent opposition; and nowhere was it later, before it obtained legal toleration. Nowhere did it occasion such streams of blood to flow; nowhere give birth to such dreadful and deadly civil wars. And nowhere have state policy, court intrigue, political parties and the ambition of greatness had so powerful an influence on the progress and fortunes of the reformation, as in France.--Schroeckh. 4. Massacre on St. Bartholomew's Eve.--During the civil wars which desolated France from the year 1560 up to the edict of Nantes--which secured religious toleration from the Protestants, 1598--occurred the massacre of St. Bartholomew's eve. A peace was concluded in 1570, by which toleration was granted the Protestants. The terms of the treaty were enforced with much apparent zeal by the French court, for the purpose, as Protestant writers claim, of lulling the Protestants into security preparatory to their assassination by order of the king. The bloody scene began at midnight of the 22nd of August, 1572. The signal for the beginning of the massacre was the tolling of the great bell of the palace. The scene of blood and murder continued for three days. During which time five hundred noblemen and about six thousand other Protestants were butchered in Paris alone. Orders were dispatched to all parts of the empire for a similar massacre everywhere. More than thirty thousand--some say seventy thousand--perished by the hands of the royal assassins; and the pope ordered a jubilee throughout Christendom.--Murdock. 5. The Decision to Introduce the "Reformed" Religion into Sweden.--This decision was the effect specially of the firmness and resolution {268} of the king [Gustavus Vasa], who declared publicly that he would rather resign his crown and retire from the kingdom, than rule over a people subjected to the laws and authority of the Roman pontiff, and more obedient to their bishops than to their king.--Mosheim.