But mind, immortal mind, could not be destroyed; for free thought, and truth, and instruction, among the people, were companions of the Reformation, and books would circulate among all ranks throughout Protestant France. The works generally came from Holland through Paris, and from Geneva, by Lyons or Grenoble. Inside of baled goods, and in cases and barrels of provisions, secretly, thousands of volumes were sent from north to south, from east to west, to the oppressed Huguenots. The great work which Louis XIV. believed buried beneath the ruins of his bloody edicts still went on silently. At Lausanne was established a seminary, about the year 1725, where works for the French Protestant people were printed and circulated. The Bishop of Canterbury, with Lord Warke, and a few foreign sovereigns, actively assisted in the founding of this institution. Thus did that beautiful town become the source of useful and religious knowledge to thousands, although it was conveyed far and wide in a very quiet and secret way. One man was condemned to the galleys for having received barrels, marked '_Black and White Peas_,' which were found full of 'Ostervald's Catechisms.' How strange it seems to us, writing in our own Protestant land, that cruel authority should ever have intervened with matters of faith! What can be more plain or truthful than that there should be liberty of conscience; and that God alone has the power and the right to direct it, and that it is an abuse and a sacrilege to come between God and conscience? After the revocation of the edict of Nantes and the death of Louis XIV., his royal successor sometimes vaguely asked himself why he persecuted his Protestant subjects? when his marshal replied, that his majesty was only the executor of former edicts. He seemed to have consoled himself that he had found the system _already_ established, and he only carried out the errors of his predecessor. Forty years of remorseless persecutions against his best subjects, without asking himself why! Of all the weaknesses of his reign, this was the most odious and the most guilty; his hand was most literally weary of signing cruel edicts against the Protestants of his kingdom, without even reading them, and which obedience to his mandates had to transcribe in letters of fire and blood, on the remotest parts of his realm.