Response à un ligueur, masqué du nom de catholique Anglois

have true Religion. Regarding this, they allege many things that we omit to avoid prolixity. Furthermore, they say that your priests and Jesuits who have been punished were doing the exact opposite of the disciples of Jesus Christ, who presented themselves to death to advance religion, whereas these men wish to have Princes and Kings killed, and practically depopulate the world of inhabitants to maintain themselves. They say further that it is under a false title that you attribute to yourselves the zeal of Religion, and that what drives you is rather true fury than zeal. For true zeal for Religion is always moved by an instinct of Charity, a virtue which can in no way be observed in you, insofar as, to establish Religion, you wish to exterminate those who wander, whom one should instead win back through good examples, sound doctrine, and fraternal exhortations. You place in the same danger the orthodox, who perish by the same ruin of civil wars, indeed ten for every one of those you call heretics, whether by arms or by the miseries that follow them. This makes such advice as yours seem pernicious to us, having experimented that we have fared very well by doing the exact opposite.

You begin after this to handle the French heretics (as you call them) in a harsh manner when you treat of their assembly at Nantes: saying that under a mute leader they conspired against the King. They say that this is as false as it is true that you are a perfect slanderer. For a man named la Bigne, secretary to la Renauldie, was taken with the records of what had been decided at Nantes, which bore as the first item a protestation to attempt nothing against the person of the King, or those of his blood, and to do nothing to the prejudice of his authority or the good of the State. And you could have known well that the party was formed against those of Guise, who, being foreigners, were meanwhile giving the law to the King and the Princes of the blood, proposing not only the recovery of the Duchy of Anjou and the County of Provence, which they say belong to them, but even the appropriation of the Crown of France, as being of the race of Charlemagne. To verify which thing, they have since had research done by learned men to make it appear so, if the occasion had presented itself as they were awaiting.

Moreover, since patience, when wounded, is converted into fury, for forty years they have been cruelly burning those of the Religion of the Huguenots, as if one had offered sacrifices to Moloch, from which