CHAPTER XV.
TOLERANCE.
If crimes against Heaven are those which the Church forgives the least, every man who is not even nominally a Catholic, is of course in the eyes of the Pope a rogue and a half.
These criminals are very numerous: the geographer Balbi enumerates some six hundred millions of them on the surface of the globe.

The Pope continues to damn them all conformably with the tradition of the Church; but he has given up levying armies to make war upon them here below.
Things are improved when we daily find the Head of the Roman Catholic Church in friendly intercourse with the foes of his religion.

He partakes of the liberality of a Mussulman Prince; he receives a schismatic Empress as a loving father; he converses familiarly with a Queen who has abjured Catholicism to marry a Protestant; he receives with distinction the aristocracy of the New Jerusalem; he sends his Majordomo to attend upon a young heretic prince[11] travelling _incognito_.

I hardly know whether Gregory VII.

would approve this tolerance; nor can I tell how it is judged in the other world by the instigators of the Crusades, or by the advisers of the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew.