He found fault with all the measures that the government took and all that he accused it of wishing to take. The creation of fourteen new bishoprics by the king with the consent of the pope was looked upon as an outrageous act of tyranny. At last the government was unarmed, the victims had been sufficiently worked upon by their leaders, and the Catholics were completely intimidated: the rage of the sects was now let loose to pervert and destroy the fair fabric that God had raised in the land. We shall not attempt to describe the hideous saturnalias of the "reform;" we leave that to Protestant authors, to Schiller, to Schoel, to Prescott. We cite from the latter a few lines to give our readers an idea of what learned Protestants say of their ancestors: "The work of pillage and devastation was carried on throughout the country. Cathedrals and chapels, convents and monasteries, whatever was a religious house, even the hospitals, were given up to the merciless reformers. Neither monk nor religious dared to appear in their habit. From time to time, priests were seen fleeing with some relic or sacred object that they desired to preserve from pillage. To the violence they did, they added every outrage that could express their scorn for the faith. In Flanders, four hundred churches were sacked. The ruin of the cathedral of Anvers could not be repaired for less than four hundred thousand ducats. ... One becomes sad in seeing that the first efforts of the reformers were always directed against these monuments of genius, erected and made perfect under the generous protection of Catholicism; but, if the first steps of the reform have been made on the ruins of art, the good it has produced in compensation cannot be denied, in breaking the chains that bound the human mind and opening to it the domains of science, to which until then all access had been refused." The readers know how much this _compensation_ is worth. {77}