"I fear," said the Count in a low voice, "I fear that they are waging the war against us, my good friend, in a manner which will deprive us of all unanimity. It is no longer what it was in former times, when the persecuting sword was all we had to fear and to resist. We have now the artful tongues of oily and deceitful disputants. We have all the hellish cunning of a sect which allows every means to be admissible, every falsehood, every misstatement, every perversion, every deceit, to be just, and right, and righteous, so that the object to be obtained is the promotion of their own creed. Thus the great mass of the weak or the ill-informed may be affected by their teachers; while at the same time gold is held out to allure the covetous--the deprivation of rank, station, office, and emolument, is employed to drive the ambitious, the slothful, and the indifferent--and threats of greater severity of persecution, mental torture, insult, indignity, and even death itself, are held over the heads of the coward and the fearful." They thus conversed as they went along, and the opinion of each but served to depress the hopes of the other more and more. Both were well acquainted with the spirit of doubt and disunion that reigned amongst the Protestants of France, a spirit of disunion which had been planted, fostered, and encouraged by every art that a body of cunning and unscrupulous men could employ to weaken the power of their adversaries. On arriving at the house of Claude de l'Estang, the pastor put into the hands of his young friend the petition to the King which he had drawn up, and which perfectly meeting his views, was immediately sent off for general signature, in order to be transmitted to Paris, and presented to the monarch. Long before it reached him, however, the final and decisive blow had been struck, and, therefore, we shall notice that paper no more. A long conversation ensued between the pastor and his young friend; and it was evident to the Count de Morseiul, that the opinions of Claude de l'Estang himself, stern and fervent as they had been in youth, now rendered milder by age, and perhaps by sorrow, tended directly to general and unquestioning submission, rather than to resistance: not indeed to the abandonment of any religious principle, not to the slightest sacrifice of faith, not to the slightest conformity of what he deemed a false religion. No; he proposed and he advised to suffer in patience for the creed that he held; to see even the temples of the reformed church destroyed, if such an extreme should be adopted; to see persons of the purer faith excluded from offices and dignity, and rank and emoluments; even to suffer, should it be necessary, plunder, oppression, and imprisonment itself, without yielding one religious doctrine; but at the same time without offering any resistance to the royal authority.