The cruelties of this age may be accounted for, though they can not be excused. Within the memory of living men, political heretics have been punished quite as severely (the stake excepted) as religious heretics, and that too without the same excuse. The priest when he burned the body hoped, or professed to hope, to save the soul: the political heretic was often sacrificed to secure a party or a minister in power. The persecutors of the sixteenth century must not, therefore, be overwhelmed with inconsiderate reproval: they were but men, living in an age when persecution was a duty, and heretics had no rights. There is still too much of the savage in the human breast, though civilization has done much to extinguish it; in the reign of Francis I. the savage was uppermost. But so remarkably did the blood of the martyrs prove the seed of the Church, that a Catholic writer compares the “Lutherans” of this time to the fabulous hydra; when one head was cut off, two sprang up in its place. And no wonder; for the author of the “History of Heresies” writes of these martyrs, even while ascribing their patient endurance to satanic influence, “that Christianity had revived in all its primitive simplicity.” In 1544 Francis I. concluded the treaty of Crespy with the Emperor Charles V., by which the two monarchs bound themselves to exterminate heresy within their respective dominions. The king chanced to be ill of a dangerous disease brought on by his licentiousness, and for five or six weeks his life hung upon a thread. The bigoted Cardinal de Tournon, making him believe that his sufferings were a judgment from God, urged him to propitiate heaven by destroying heresy. Moved by these motives, and by misrepresentations which the victims had no opportunity of correcting, for they were never heard, Francis issued an order for the extirpation of the Waldenses of Provence, who appear to have excited the wrath of the clergy to a terrible height. These Vaudois, as they are usually called, the better to distinguish them from the Waldenses of Savoy, lived in the south-east corner of France, between the Durance and the Alps. They were a peaceable, God-fearing, industrious race,[11] and had been a living protest against the Church of Rome for hundreds of years--even from the days of Constantine, if their annals may be trusted. Louis XII. is reported to have called them “better Christians than himself;”[12] and a Romish missionary, who was sent to turn them from the error of their ways, was himself converted and forced to acknowledge that “he had learned more from the little Vaudois children than he had ever done at college.” In the wildest valleys of the Alps, and on rocky heights where the chamois could hardly keep his footing, they built their huts and tended their flocks. They had covered a barren district with smiling harvests, “making the desert blossom as the rose.” Du Bellay, governor of Piedmont, describes them as “a simple