From that day to this Protestantism has sanctioned the outrages thus advised and thus committed. The right of Protestants to demolish, on any slight pretext, Catholic churches, convents, shrines, monuments, or pictures, seems even now a sort of self-evident axiom, its exercise being regulated merely by grounds of expediency. England and the United States can show their examples of this, even in the present century; in the last, the outrages committed by New England troops in Canada and Acadia whenever a Catholic church fell into their power; the careful aiming of cannon at the monastic buildings in the siege of Quebec; the expedition against Louisburg, with the chaplain bearing an axe to demolish the idols; at once suggest themselves to the mind. That Catholics possessed any right to their own churches, their own ideas of worship, was never entertained for a moment. The civil law might justly repress such men, if not on the simple ground of teaching false doctrines, at least for their claim of right to destroy the liberty of those who professed the religion of their ancestors. For some years the reform gained slowly in France, the emissaries of Calvin never relaxing their efforts, and finally winning to their side Queen Jane of Navarre, the Prince of Condé and the three famous brothers of the house of Chatillon, D'Andelot, Admiral Coligny, find the profligate Cardinal Odet. By this time the Protestant churches, true to their aggressive character, assumed a military organization, as White (p. 23) and Fauriel, a recent French Protestant author, admit, and aimed at the overthrow alike of Catholicity and royalty. This secret preparation for an armed attempt to secure the mastery of France had, by 1560, attained its full development.[Footnote 2] {5} The moment had come for a grand effort which was to exterminate Catholicity from France as utterly as it has been from Sweden, where not even gratitude for their foremost struggle for independence saved the Catholic Dalecarlians from annihilation. [Footnote 2: Consult _Mémoires de Saulx Tavannes_, p. 29; Lavallée, _Histoire des Français_, i. p. 575; Fauriel, _Essai sur les Evénements qui ont précédé et antené le St. Barthélemy_, p. 19-] The position of affairs in France justified the hopes of the reformers. There were three parties in the state--the earnest Catholic party, headed by the Guises of Lorraine; the Huguenot party, directed by Calvin, with Condé in France as its future king, and Coligny as its master-spirit; and, as usual in such cases, a third party of weak men, who hampered the Catholics, and thus strengthened their opponents, by hesitation, uncertainty, and fitfulness.