a king with a bit of wood, how could this piece of wood be dear to the king?" Their ecclesiastical government was in the main presbyterian, and in politics they showed a decided leaning toward democracy. They wore long faces, looked askance at frivolous amusements, and were terribly in earnest. Of the more obscure pages of mediaeval history, none are fuller of interest than those in which we decipher the westward progress of these sturdy heretics through the Balkan peninsula into Italy, and thence into southern France, where toward the end of the twelfth century we find their ideas coming to full blossom in the great Albigensian heresy. It was no light affair to assault the church in the days of Innocent III. The terrible crusade against the Albigenses, beginning in 1207, was the joint work of the most powerful of popes and one of the most powerful of French kings. On the part of Innocent it was the stamping out of a revolt that threatened the very existence of the Catholic hierarchy; on the part of Philip Augustus it was the suppression of those too independent vassals the Counts of Toulouse, and the decisive subjection of the southern provinces to the government at Paris. Nowhere in European history do we read a more frightful story than that which tells of the blazing fires which consumed thousand after thousand of the most intelligent and thrifty people in France. It was now that the Holy Inquisition came into existence, and after forty years of slaughter these Albigensian Cathari or Puritans seemed exterminated. The practice of burning heretics, first enacted by statute in Aragon in 1197, was adopted in most parts of Europe during the thirteenth century, but in England not until the beginning of the fifteenth. The Inquisition was never established in England. Edward II. attempted to introduce it in 1311 for the purpose of suppressing the Templars, but his utter failure showed that the instinct of self-government was too strong in the English people to tolerate the entrusting of so much power over men's lives to agents of the papacy. Mediaeval England was ignorant and bigoted enough, but under a representative government which so strongly permeated society, it was impossible to set the machinery of repression to work with such deadly thoroughness as it worked under the guidance of Roman methods. When we read the history of persecution in England, the story in itself is dreadful enough; but when we compare it with the horrors enacted in other countries, we arrive at some startling results. During the two centuries of English persecution, from Henry IV. to James I., some 400 persons were burned at the stake, and three-fourths of these cases occurred in 1555-57, the last three years of Mary Tudor. Now in a single province of Spain, in the single year 1482, about 2000 persons were burned. The lowest estimates of the number slain for heresy in the Netherlands in the course of the sixteenth century place it at 75,000.