who had taken refuge in a cavern in the papal territory of Avignon, were smothered to death, the vice-legate kindling the fire with his own hands.[16] In fine, twenty-four towns and villages were destroyed and 3000 persons put to death. Such little boys and girls as the soldiers did not want were sold into slavery: they might be purchased for a crown apiece. And that none might escape, the Parliament of Provence issued a proclamation, forbidding the neighbors to offer the Vaudois either food or shelter, so that many were starved to death in the mountains.[17] The tale of these fearful atrocities provoked a cry of indignation from one end of the country to the other:[18] even the king complained that his orders had been exceeded, but not until after the letters patent of 18th August, 1545, approving of all that had been done. We are told that the memories of these cruelties haunted his dying-bed, and that he bequeathed to his son the duty of taking vengeance on the murderers of the Vaudois. This may be true, but when the Swiss cantons remonstrated with him for his cruelty, he bade them mind their own business, for the heretics had merely received the just reward of their crimes. The only person punished for these horrors--and that was at the suit of Madame de Cantal, whose property had been ruined by the slaughter of her peasantry--was one Guérin, king’s advocate in the Parliament of Aix.[19] M. d’Oppède appears to have been so terrified at the mere idea of being tried, that he fell ill and died in great suffering; a judgment of God, as the Reformed declared it. A Catholic historian of these days has ventured to apologize for cruelties which could find no defender in the sixteenth century. “Certain names,” he says, “are branded for what is the result of a popular force and movement by which they are carried away. In a religious and believing state of society there are necessities, as there have been cruel political necessities at another epoch. Exaltation of ideas drives men to crime as by a fatality.”[20] Such reasoning will justify any crime, public or private. To admit the cowardly doctrine of “necessity,” is to destroy moral responsibility, to make intellect subservient to matter, and justice to brute force. It makes the usurper or the murderer accuser, judge and executioner in his own cause. It is a vindication of _coups d’état_--a deification of successful villainy. If generally admitted, it would induce a moral torpor fatal to all intelligence. There were men living in the Catholic communion in the sixteenth century who thought very differently from the paradoxical historian of the nineteenth. Sadolet, Bishop of Carpentras--a man so full of kindness and charity that a modern writer has called him the “Fénelon of his age”--interfered to suspend the execution of the first decree against the Vaudois of Mérindol. He was a ripe scholar and corresponded with all the learned men of the day, heretical or orthodox, including