And so long as the superstitious element of human nature enables individuals or combinations of them to dictate to their fellow-creatures those relations, or to dogmatize concerning those conditions--to take possession of their consciences in short, and to interpose their mummeries between man and his Creator--it is, probable that such scenes as caused the nations to shudder, throughout so large a portion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will continue to repeat themselves at intervals in various parts of the earth.

Nothing can be more sublime than the self-sacrifice, nothing more demoniac than the crimes, which human creatures have seemed always ready to exhibit under the name of religion.
It was and had been really civil war in France.

In the Netherlands it had become essentially a struggle for independence against a foreign monarch; although the germ out of which both conflicts had grown to their enormous proportions was an effort of the multitude to check the growth of papacy.
In France, accordingly, civil war, attended by that gaunt sisterhood, murder, pestilence, and famine, had swept from the soil almost everything that makes life valuable.

It had not brought in its train that extraordinary material prosperity and intellectual development at which men wondered in the Netherlands, and to which allusion has just been made.

But a fortunate conjunction of circumstances had now placed Henry of Navarre in a position of vantage.